VIDEO 1:

Hi, I’m Maggie Stiefvater and this is my seminar on writing. I’ve been doing this professionally
for just about a decade, and I reckon I’ve published over a million words, and I’m about to talk
to you about writing for just about eight hours but before I do, I feel like I need to say a
somewhat lengthy disclaimer. And it’s this: you might watch me talk about writing for eight
hours and learn absolutely nothing.

Now, you might watch me talk about writing for eight hours and come away with a great
American novel, but I can’t promise that, nor can I predict it. And it’s because of this: every
brain is different, and moreover, this process we call novel writing is actually translation. It’s a
hugely complicated process where we take something that’s abstract in our head and make it
concrete. Now this abstract thing, this novel in our mind, exists in its perfect form in the hard
drive that is your brain. It’s beyond words, it’s feelings, it’s scenarios, it’s all possibilities and we
must find a way to cram that into words, into something concrete, for someone else to
experience.

The process of novel writing is about making those two visions as close as possible. To try and
make the idea in our head look the same as the concrete version and vice versa. Like I said, I’ve
been doing this for a decade and I’m still learning the tips and tricks of doing it. But the reason
that my tips and tricks might not work for yours is only you speak this language up here, so the
translation process of making this abstract into that concrete; that’s going to be custom. What
you’re actually doing is making a custom decoder ring, just for you.

Now I have to admit, that I find this concept somewhat daunting as a teacher. When I set up
this seminar, I thought how can I make this as useful for other writers as possible, trying to
think of all the different ways that we write, all the different ways of getting things out of our
head, it just stopped me in my tracks.

And then I remembered, about five years ago I was asked to speak at the National Conference
for the Society of Children’s Books, Illustrators, and Writers, no, other way around. I always get
it wrong. Society of Children’s Book’s, Writers, And Illustrators. It’s a tongue twister. CBWI,
there you go. Anyway, it’s a very big organization, full of many published writers, and their
national conference was very intimidating. I was supposed to speak on stage, to these authors,
many of them published, many of them well published, talk to them about writing, and I just
thought, “it’s not like I’m talking to a crowd full of newbies, I can’t just jump on the table and
bewilder and bamboozle them by waving my arms about, I have to provide real content.”

I felt quite outclassed, really. I went to the organizer with my concerns, and she said Maggie.
Look, you can’t teach them how to write. Teach them how you write. Oh sure, wisdom, fine, be
that way.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do in this seminar, I’m not going to teach you how to write.
There’s a million ways to write, there’s a million ways to translate this to this, and you have to
learn a lot of it yourself, it’s going to be custom made parts, just for you. But maybe some of my
tips and tricks will help along the way.

Now, there’s another disclaimer I have to give, which is another way my tips and tricks might
not work for you is because of this: every writer has different goals. Some writers, they write to
get an idea out of their head. Some of them write to exercise a personal ghost. Some of them
write to retell a story they thought was always done wrong. Some of them write for fame. Some
of them- I mean, there’s a million different reasons why people put pens to paper, and if your
priorities aren’t the same as mine, you’re going to have different ways of looking at writing.

For me, I always knew what kind of writer I wanted to be, ever since I was small. I wanted to be
the kind of writer that you walked into the Costco and on the table you saw stacks of books,
and you would walk through the airport, and there would be cardboard stands, and you would
see the books stuffed in there, and you know exactly what kind of books I’m talking about. They
always have the writer’s name bigger than anything, and then a little title. It’s always like:
MAGGIE STIEFVATER. Dead man running. MAGGIE STIEFVATER. Point Blank. MAGGIE
STIEFVATER. Call down the hawk.

My goal was always commercial fiction, commercial fiction, the goal is always going to be about
accessibility. It’s got priorities that involve- you’re thinking about the other person all the time.
You’re thinking about the reader, putting themselves in their shoes. There’s a lot of
compromise, and sometimes that means changing things around to make it easier for them to
understand or to make the story simpler. Commercial fiction, yeah. All of my writing advice is
seen through that lens, of being as commercial as possible.

Is that the best way to write?

Absolutely not.

Is it the only way to write?

Absolutely not.

Do I try and do it as well as possible?

Yes, I absolutely do.

But that means when you hear my tips and tricks, sometimes you’ll hear something that just
absolutely feels wrong, and just throw it out. Just throw it out. You might have to throw out 90
percent of this, but if you get ten percent, you know what? I’ll consider it a success.

Now, okay, onto the game plan for this seminar. What we’re going to try and do is we’re going
to try and move from internal to external, because after all, that’s the way you write a book. It
starts in your head, gets made into words, and hopefully ends up in the reader’s hands on the
other side.

I know that it’s a somewhat unpopular idea to suggest that you think about the reader before
the very end. A very commonly quoted piece of advice is that you’re SUPPOSED TO WRITE FOR
YOURSELF, WRITE FROM THE HEART, ONLY FOR YOU, and then you care, and I would never
take that away from you, but for me that doesn’t work.

For me, I’m a storyteller. And a story is not complete until you have an audience.

To me, it doesn’t seem valuable to write a funny scene if it doesn’t make someone else laugh. I
don’t understand why I spend hours making a chapter as miserable and sad as I possibly can if I
don’t have the proof of someone else’s tears. For me, all of this process of writing is the
translation. It’s for them.

If I want the perfect, unvarnished version of this story, well, it’s playing up there already. I don’t
need to do all of this busywork. So, for me, all of this internal to external is to reach that goal,
which is to put it into someone else’s hands.

I know it’s easy to get frozen up knowing that the end product has to be perfect to get into
someone else’s hands and imagining the criticism and the people not liking your work, can
often stop you in your tracks. I think it’s important that you do the internal to external in the
proper order, and that keeps you from getting that deer in the headlights look.

Imagine it like you’re going to the grocery store to get a gallon of milk. You get in your car, go
and park, go into the store, get the milk, give someone money, the milk is yours. You’re not
going to get into the car and just start throwing money out the window, wrong order. Crazy
talk, that will never get you milk. You want a gallon of milk. I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Moving on. Here’s our actual plan.

Act One: internal. We’re going to talk about everything that is developing an idea in the
abstract. Everything before you write words on paper. Doing as much of the work as possible,
before we actually begin to type. Setting ourselves up for success.

Act Two is going to be about writing. Actual mechanics. Typing, the toolbox, it’s going to be
about paragraph, shape, chapter length, drafting strategies, and then

Act Three is going to be external. Your manuscript right before and right after it’s in someone
else’s hands. Critique, editing, revision, the head game of having your work out there.

And I think ultimately what I want you to remember is this: This should be fun. I don’t mean this
should be easy. In fact, if it’s easy, you’re probably doing it wrong. It’s going to be hard. And I
don’t mean that you’re doing to be happy all the time, either. You’re going to write crap, who
wants to write crap? That’s not fun. It is kind of fun, it’s kind of challenging. The most excellent
game. But the thing about games is that they’re really the most fun if you know what’s going
on. Hopefully this toolbox will help out with that. Okay, let’s go.
VIDEO 2:

I started writing when I was small, very small. Scrawny, really, I think is the word for it. I was actually so
scrawny as a child that, at one point, my teachers, who were nuns, sent a sternly worded letter home to
my parents advising them that if they didn't start feeding me, they were going to notify the appropriate
authorities.
Now, in my parents' defense, they were trying to feed me. But at the time I only really liked to eat foods
that ended with the letter O, like SpaghettiOs, Cheerios, Oreos, also bread. I ate a lot of bread. I was
basically a bread-based entity. Look, these things are not nutritional backbones. Don't do it.
Anyway, as a child, like I said, I was scrawny. Also, in full disclosure, I was also very unfriendly. Yeah. I
didn't care for hugs in particular. I still don't like them now. People try and hug me. I don't understand
why a stranger has their arms wrapped around me without buying me dinner first. I don't know.
But I was worse as a child. People would try and hug me, probably because I looked like I was going to
blow away. They would hold onto me, and I would either become all elbows, or if they squeezed tighter,
sometimes I could actually manage to become a dark cloud of noxious gas and dissipate on the ceiling.
Yeah.
Scrawny, unfriendly, and a writer. I remember, actually, writing a novel when I was small, scrawny and
unfriendly. I was typing this novel away on my dad's word processor, which should tell you how old this
story is, that I was typing on a word processor. This was back before iPhones and laptops were even a
sparkle in Satan's eye. Word processor. I was typing away on this novel, and my father approached me.
He said, "So, Maggie, what do you want to be when you grow up?" I looked at him. In retrospect, I
probably had all of the charm of a baby praying mantis. I said, "Oh, I want to be a writer." He said, "Oh,
you want to be poor."
Now, in his defense, I do remember the novel that I was working on. It was a novel about two dogs test
driving a car. They were Scottish Terriers. It was a red Porsche. Maybe not the stuff of bestsellerdom.
Actually, that wasn't really my problem. My problem was that already I had a writerly problem that
would persist through my young adulthood. My problem was this. I did not finish books. Actually, the
problem was worse than that. It was this. I sometimes finished books.
I know that doesn't sound like it's worse, but it is. If the condition was constant, if I never finished books,
when I finished a book, then I could celebrate when I finally did, because I conquered the problem. I
learned myself. Instead, it was this nebulous, "Am I going to finish it? Am I not going to finish it? Why did
I finish this one? Why didn't I finish that one?" I had no idea, when I started writing a novel, whether or
not I would ever get to the end.
Instead, I would, several times a year, experience a feeling that I'm sure you guys feel often, which is
that burst of inspiration that comes when you know that a story is near, right? It comes on when you
hear a new song, or when you finish a book that really inspires you, or you're just cruising along in the
car and it hits you like a load of bricks. All of a sudden, you need some place to put words in. You need a
notebook or a laptop or a word processor to start pouring words in. I would feel this feeling, and I would
go running over, begin throwing words down, five pages, 15 pages, sometimes 400 pages. More often
than not, I guess, I would start to gradually slow down and eventually crawl to a halt.
I didn't know why. All I knew was that whenever I did, I would always insert a chapter where aliens
would arrive and just kill everybody. Didn't matter what the genre of the book was. Political thriller?
Aliens. Historical fiction? Aliens. Contemporary fantasy? Aliens. Sweet coming of age story? Aliens. Yeah.
I wonder if I had written an alien book, if I would have been able to finish it, because after all, a chapter
with aliens killing everyone would match.
No. I don't think so. As any non-finisher can tell you, once you get into the habit of not finishing novels,
you become a champion at it. There is always a reason to not finish a novel. This idea is stupid. I've
thought of a better idea. My main character is unlikable. I've written myself into a corner. No one's
going to be interested in this subject matter. This novel has 99 problems, and me finishing it is not one
of them. Non-finishing? Aliens.
I had no idea what made me get to the end sometimes. For a brief time, I actually thought that maybe
the rule that predicted me finishing it was knowing the ending, that if I knew where I was headed, I
would get there. I thought, "Well, it's like a road trip, right?" If you get into a car, and you say, "I'm going
to Cleveland," you might get lost along way, but eventually you'll get to Cleveland, barring misfortune.
However, I thought, if you don't say to yourself, "Cleveland," and you just get into the car and drive full
of excitement, you could just circle around forever. You might even end up in Cleveland, not even
knowing that it was a great place to stop, and just keep on going to Dayton or something. I don't know
how this metaphor turned into a being lost in the Midwest thing. Let's move on. Move on.
Anyway, the point was, it didn't matter anyway, because it turned out that sometimes I could know that
I was going to Cleveland, and I could still make up a lot of reasons why going to Cleveland was actually a
dumb idea anyway, and not finish it. Aliens.
This whole problem persisted through my young adulthood, as I was drafting and drafting and drafting.
By the time I got to college, I had over 30 novels in various stages of disarray. It wasn't until I graduated
for my degree that I actually worked out what the actual problem was, what I needed to finish.
I was a history major, and I would write all of these papers, 40 page papers, 100 page papers, and guess
what. I always finished them. There was no aliens in history. What was the difference? Here was the
thing. I had to know what I intended to write.
That awkward cut was made possible by a cat howling outside the door. It's gone now. Not forever. It
may be back later. It's a long seminar.
Anyway, as I was saying, the thing that I learned was that the greatest predictor for me knowing if I was
going to get to the end of my novel was whether or not I knew what I intended to write. I realize that
sounds oversimplified and ridiculous, because, of course, "Well, yes. If you know what you're going to
write, you're going to write it."
But what I really mean is I needed to know what kind of book I intended to write. I needed to know what
the end product looked like. Not the beginning. I didn't need to know the flesh of the idea, the passion,
the id or whatever. I needed to know that final product. What did it feel like? What did it look like? I
needed to know more about it. I was starting without, not a plan, but without information instead.
So what I ended up with was instead this giant document that started out with passion and purpose, and
then became a tangle of these strange logistical decisions. Because instead of making decisions based on
what kind of book I wanted it to be, I made decisions based upon how I could get to the next chapter
instead. I made decisions on the fly.
I would make decisions like, "Oh, well, I need this character to talk to an adult. Who would be an adult in
this world? Guidance counselor." Now, did I ever really want to write a novel about a guidance
counselor? Did I have a passion for a guidance counselor to be in that scene? No. It was just a decision
made to solve a problem on the fly, neither right, nor wrong.
That's fine, but once you pile those on top of each other, eventually you find that you crawled out to the
end of the very fine branches on the tree, and it will not hold you. At least that was the case with me.
Too many logistical decisions, too much scratch paperwork, and the tree down would come baby, cradle
and all. Scrawny, cranky, recalcitrant baby. That was me.
Instead, what I discovered is that I needed to make my big decisions first, because of this truth, a novel
is a series of decisions. Every time you decide what your novel is going to be, you're also deciding all of
the novels that you're not going to write.
Those of you who have finished novels before might be familiar with this wonderful phenomenon that
happens often at the very end of the draft. You've been slaving away for months and months, putting in
200 words a day, 2,000 words a day, 100 words a day, fighting for every single one of them. Then all of a
sudden, it clicks. In the very last stretch of the manuscript, you just pour words in. It's like the beginning
all over again. You're just pouring words in there.
The reason why this works is because a novel is a series of decisions. You're always asking yourself,
"What's this timeframe going to look like? How am I going to frame this chapter? Where am I going to
set this scene? When is this character going to turn evil? Is this character going to turn evil? Who's going
to be involved in this chapter?"
At a certain point in that manuscript, sometimes 30,000 words from the end, and sometimes 3,000
words from the end, you've made all of those decisions, and all that remains is for you execute them. As
we've already pointed out, typing, the mechanics, that's the easy part. That's fast. All the words come
pouring in there.
What I have learned is that what I need is to step myself through a pretty predictable flowchart that
allows me to keep most of my brainstorming in my head before I ever let myself touch a laptop. If I start
working on a story now, without knowing all of these things, I can tell you, I can feel the aliens near. I
still finish things, but the aliens, I can feel them. I got to do this step, the steps of the flowchart.
Here's the reason why it feels important. It hearkens back to what I said in the introduction about
translation. Your story's natural format is in your head. That's its natural language, thought, nebulous,
huge, boundaryless thought. As long as your novel exists in your head, it doesn't have to follow logic. It
can just follow dream rules. Things don't have to join up. Nothing has to make sense. Your ideas can be
huge and crazy and limitless. That's how you get dynamic, active fiction.
I want to keep my brain able to be nimble up there. I want to be able to turn over permutations of my
story again and again without losing anything by corrupting that format, because translation is amazing,
I love writing for readers, but I never forget this, the real version of my novel is up here.
I could lose every single word that I've ever typed on one of my novels. It could be deleted, and I would
still have not deleted the novel, because the novel is here. This is always a transcription. It's always a
translation, which means it's always a compromise. My goal, the way that I work now, is to keep the
compromise as far down the pipeline as possible.
What I'm going to do in the next section is I'm going to walk you through the flowchart, the different
steps of things that I keep in my head before I allow myself to pick up a laptop or a notebook or a word
processor and type things in. Because for me, that's the only way to keep the aliens at bay.
A few years ago, I was asked to give a TED Talk. If you don't know what a TED Talk is, I suggest you pause
this video right now and Google it so you can see how cool it is. I'll wait. Cool, right? Yes. There is a TED
Talk for everything. I was very flattered.
This particular TED conference was being put on by NASA, spaceship NASA. Yes, they asked me. Yes, it's
a long story. No, we do not have time for it. Anyway, it was a very cool experience. I got to give this talk
on a stage to a bunch of incredible intellectuals. There was a cool person giving talks about comets
before me, and a cool person giving talks about business strategy after me. It was great.
Anyway, after the conference was all done, I was riding on the NASA shuttle. Okay, really, it was the
shuttle back to the hotel, but the conference was put on by NASA, so technically it was the NASA
shuttle. Let me have this.
I was in the NASA shuttle, and one of the other speakers sat down beside me. I recognized him. It was
Daniel Burrus. He had given a great talk on business strategy. I said, "I really liked your talk." He told me
that he really liked mine. Then he said, "I noticed that you talk on stage, and you write novels, and you
write music, and you create art. What you think your skill really is?"
Now, I recognized a wizard riddle when I heard one, so I didn't answer right away. I didn't say, "Writing."
Instead, I thought about it. Then, quite craftily I thought, I replied, "Storytelling." He said, "Nope." No?
You are a stranger who just met me here on a NASA shuttle after hearing me talk for what, 11 minutes
on stage. You can just say, "Nope." I turned to him, and I said, "Right, so what do you think my skill is?"
Without missing a beat, he said, "Changing people's moods." Fine, wizard, point to you.
It's true. That's the thing that unites everything that I do. I want to take people to someplace else. I want
to make them feel differently about whatever it is that they do. I want to change people's moods.
Wizards.
Anyway, I tell you this story so that I can contextualize what I'm about to tell you about my flowchart. I
told you I have a flowchart of things that I need to brainstorm and know before I begin writing anything
into a draft. I want you to have that story in your back pocket so you understand why my first thing that
I look at, before anything else in my novels, most important, king, queen, prince and princess of
decisions in my novel writing process is this, mood. Number one. I can't start a novel without knowing it,
and I can't finish a novel without making sure I've done what I intended to do mood-wise.
Now, I know this might sound like an insubstantial beginning for a novel, lightweight, but we engage
with story at the level of mood at all times. You can test this for yourself. Picture that you're going into a
movie theater without knowing what it is that is out, currently available to watch. Do you look at the
choices and say, "You know what I'm thinking about? I was thinking maybe we could watch a movie
that's about a man dressing up in a costume that's the form of his childhood fear, and fighting crime in
an urban area." No. You'll say something like, "I'm looking for a character driven thriller," or, "I'm looking
for a Gothic romance," or, "I'm looking for a comedy." You come at it with, "How do I want to feel for
the next two hours of my life?" You don't come at it from the level of story or character. It's that feeling.
You can tell that we engage with it at that level, because again, think about a favorite movie of yours,
one of those unassailable movies, one of those you could watch again and again and again. It's just you.
You love it. Imagine a time that you've watched that movie with someone who really isn't that into it,
and you can feel it, and they pick it apart. They say things like, "Oh, they couldn't really make that jump
across those buildings," or, "That's a plot hole the size of a moon crater," or, "That character is strangely
unpleasant and problematic." You're like, "Shut up. Shut up. Just watch the movie. Watch the movie."
But they can't just watch the movie. Why can you? Because it's giving you what you want in the mood
department. It's like listening to a deep cut song in a genre that you love. If the timbre is what you like, if
that's your groove, you don't care if it's catchy, you don't care if it's badly produced, that's your jam.
Mood is your jam.
So I'm asking myself, when I start a book, how do I want to make the reader feel? This is kind of what I'm
talking about when I talked about thinking about the external end game. I'm not asking myself, "What
does a reader want from me? What does a reader want me to make them feel?" I'm asking, "How do I
want to feel for the next four months of my life, and how can I make the reader feel like that too?" All of
my decisions about the book that come after that are subservient to mood. This helps me make better
decisions, faster decisions later, because it's ruling out all of the books that I'm not writing instead.
Mood, absolutely important.

VIDEO 3:
All right. Now we've covered the first item on my flow chart of decision making, all of the big concepts
that I need to look at and think about before I'm allowed to type a single thing into a manuscript, lest
the aliens come down and kill everyone. So we're freed up to look at the second item on my list. After
we've looked at mood, now I look at idea. Now, when I started writing this seminar, I asked myself,
what's the one thing I wish that I could give to every single person watching this seminar? If there was a
single thing that I could pass on, just one, what would it be? And when I thought about it, it wasn't a tip
or a trick, it was actually a mindset, because the thing I would give to everybody watching if I could was
just this, durability.
Durability is kind of a borg against perfection. I think that that's actually the greatest enemy to a creative
lifestyle period is this concept of perfection. Perfection doesn't exist in our industry and yet so many
writers strive for it. And I do think that's valuable to reach for it, to always be doing the best that you
can, but you're never going to get to the best. It just doesn't exist. Well, actually it does, because the
perfect version of your novel as we've already talked about is saved on that hard drive of your mind. A
novel's perfect form is in thought and thought is huge and vast and complicated. The moment we begin
to translate it into words, we're trafficking in perfection. So yes, death to perfection, embracing
durability. That's something I would like to give to each of you guys.
And this is pertinent to ideas because of this, ideas are disposable. I've met a lot of aspiring writers in my
time, and quite a few of them have been working on projects for years upon years upon years. Are you
one of these folks who's been working on a manuscript for years upon years? Because I'll give you the
advice that I give all of them which is, put that book down. If you've been working on it for more than a
couple of years, and it's your first novel, put it down. I'm sure you've learned a lot while writing that
novel, but it's very difficult if you've learned a whole lot to actually execute it in an old draft. The old
draft is structurally strange, the prose is strange, trying to put everything you've learned into that means
that you can only get it so much better, but if you put it down and come up with a whole new novel
from scratch, you can exercise all of these new skills that you've learned.
And then you can come back to that old one and revise it with the confidence that comes from having
created another draft in between. But when I tell these writers that advice, they often look at me,
heartbroken and crestfallen, and they say, "I can't do that. That's the only good idea that I've ever had."
No, it's not, it's not. I promise you that it's not. I know that it feels that way. I know that it feels that way,
especially if the world is messed up or if you've been working on the same project and you're backed up
there or if you're sleep deprived or whatever, there's a million reasons why ideas might get stuck in the
pipeline, but I promise you, you are wired to make ideas.
Humans are story makers. We see everything in beginnings and middles and ends. We ask what if all the
time. What is anxiety, but a game of what if, where are the consequences are always the worst ones
possible. We are designed to come up with ideas. I promise you, there are more, throw away that one
idea and more will appear as soon as you put it down. We're going to talk about how we can develop
that in a bit. But right now, what I want to talk about is this, ideas aren't precious. Another thing I often
hear from aspiring writers is the fear that their idea is not unique enough or that their idea will be
stolen. They can't talk to other writers about it because they'll nick it and they will write something great
with it before they can manage to finish it.
I promise you that ideas are not that precious. Ideas are the tiniest possible building block of a novel.
They're important obviously, but they are prerequisite for a novel. They need so much more poured on
top of them. And if you're being true to yourself, a great specific writer, writing the story that only you
can write, the story that you wish you could find on the shelf, but can't, I promise you, you're going to
transform that idea into something that looks entirely different from someone else, because it is such a
tiny little building block. I think if I gave everyone who was watching this seminar the same idea and
said, "Guys, get on out there, write me a novel using this idea, write the novel, only you can write the
novel you wish you could find on the shelf. Then remember, send it back to me, make sure the
dedication page says for Maggie Stiefvater, my mentor."
I think that I would probably get back hundreds of novels that looked nothing like each other, because
think about all of the Cinderella retellings, think about all of the alien apocalypse stories. They all have
different meanings, themes. They all wear different clothing, details, the character arcs. There's so much
that goes on top of an idea that remember, ideas are tiny, they're fragile, they're disposable. They're not
precious. There's always more because idea making is a muscle. Some of you might know that before I
was a full time author, I was a full time portrait artist, a professional portrait artist. Now I know that this
sounds like a very sexy job and possibly you are imagining what my daily work looked like, maybe you're
thinking that I drove out to the countryside here in Virginia to a large country house. And maybe I was
let in by a housekeeper or a butler.
Maybe I walked along a hallway that was lined with exciting portraits of ancestors, and then I would
meet my future subject Benedict Cumberbatch, the fourth, and then I would create a portrait that
would join the others and those storied halls. Don't get me wrong, sometimes that was actually my work
day. But also in between portrait commissions, I would also paint copies of the old masters with the
heads of cats on them and sell them on eBay. Yeah, that was the not so sexy part of that job. I painted a
lot of cats, doing a lot of things. Right, moving on, why was I telling you this story? Oh right, painting.
While I was this artist, there was a movement going on, it was called A Painting a Day. And the entire
goal of it was to create an entire painting as it suggests a day.
You would conceive of the painting, you would plan the painting, complete the painting, all in the span
of one day. I thought, you know what? That sounds like a great challenge, and I could paint a lot of cats
that way. I'm going to give it a shot, and I did. I did it for a little over a year, nearly two years and
somewhere out there are hundreds upon hundreds of Maggie Stiefvater pieces of art. You might have
one, I don't know. And what was amazing about this process was that I learned so much from the
process of creating a piece from beginning to end. I had to do it very fast because I had my portrait
commissions as well. I wasn't spending any more time a day on art, but I was spending my time
differently on art because I was thinking about the entire process again and again and again, instead of
spending that time working on the same piece for longer.
Anyway, my art from the beginning to end, it was unrecognizable, I improved so much. Fast forward to
when I become a newly published author, and I had to critique partners who were my partners in crime.
I remembered this old lesson I had learned with A Painting a Day and I thought to myself, I wonder if you
could apply that to writing. I wonder if this there's such a thing as a story a day, could I do that? I turned
to my critique partners and I said, "Guys, what do you think about starting a blog and we each write a
short story every day?" And they said, "Maggie, you are a crazy person." I said, "All right, well, how
about a short story every week?" And they said, "That's slightly less crazy, we're in."
So we started a blog. It was called Merry Sisters of Fate, and for several years, we each posted a short
story there. Every single week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we had our assigned day. And gosh, so the
first week I remember, I think mine was a Friday, all week I tried to think about what I was going to write
for my short story. And in the end, I remember I just arduously taking hours upon hours, wrote this kind
of painfully stilted, retelling of a fairy tale and put it up there, I thought, this is harder than I thought. By
the end of it though, I had learned so much by the process of going again and again and again like
Painting a Day.
Conceiving it, citing what makes a good character, what looks like a hook, what does an ending look like,
what does prose look like. Doing all of those things in quick order made me so much faster and so much
more proficient. I said ... I remember by the end of our time there, it would be my day, It would be a
couple hours before I needed to post something, and I would look around and say, "Right, what am I
going to write about today? Okay, maybe huh, Sentir video camera, probably someone's soul is stuck in
that video camera, go." Because I had understood at that point what it taught me that lesson was the
disposability of ideas, the unpleasantness of ideas, and the idea that idea making is a muscle.
It's a skill, because what I learned is that the idea is such a tiny part of the entire project. Everything you
build on top of it is what makes it exciting, you just need that spark, that's it. The other thing I learned
was that really everyone can use the same idea and come up with a different story. I'm not suggesting it,
I'm just saying it's possible. One of the things that we would do sometimes to make our lives easier at
Merry Sisters of Fate is we would assign a common prompt. We would all start with something like, The
Lady of Shalott or the color blue, and we would each write a story that was based upon that.
You'd think, especially with a prompt like The Lady of Shalott, a poem, that with all of that information
included in the idea, that our stories would look quite similar, but Brenna and Tessa and I were such
different writers and we had such different priorities for our storytelling, that in the end, we ended up
with three stories that never looked anything like each other. Ideas are not precious, you don't have to
worry about someone stealing them. An idea making is a muscle. If you get into the habit of looking for
ideas and executing them, your brain starts to pick them up for you, producing them faster, I absolutely
promise it.
Okay. Next idea related thing, is my idea any good? If I had a dime for every time I was asked this
question. When you sit on an airplane and people find out that you're a novelist, the first thing they
want to do is tell you their idea for a story, and then they always finish it up with, "Is my idea any good?"
I can't tell you that. I can't tell you that. It's an unanswerable question. It's an irrelevant question. Do
you know why? Because there is no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea. Now I know that when I say
that, I can feel the judgment coming through the camera. You are thinking, Oh no, there is such thing as
a bad idea, I can promise you that because I read this book last month, then, whoa, bad idea. No, I don't
believe it. I mean, obviously there are exceptions to every single rule, but really what there is is bad
execution.
An idea is such a small little piece that usually no, no, it's just the start. I don't believe that there's such
thing really as a good idea or a bad idea. Now, that said, I do believe that there is such a thing as a good
idea or a bad idea for you. A good idea for you is this, personal, specific, exciting, and it excludes
secondary sources. Now what do I mean by this? All right, first of all, personal, you'll notice that I said a
good idea is personal, not autobiographical. It's going to sound in the seminar like I'm giving people who
are writing autobiographical novels a hard time, and I really don't mean to. My big complaint with
autobiographical novels really comes from my priorities as a writer. I'm a big commercial writer. I want
to continue writing novels for my entire life, many, many, many novels. And here's how many
autobiographical novels you get, because there's only one of you. After that, you have to live another
lifetime basically in order to have another autobiographical novel.
So instead of saying, I want your story to be autobiographical, what I'd like is for your idea to be
personal. Now what's the difference? Personal means that it is important to you. It doesn't necessarily
mean that it is about you. Now, It can mean that it is about you. You can actually be autobiographical as
long as you have distance or space. You can either have distance of time, you're writing about
something that happened to you way in the past, so you can look at yourself as a character and remove
it and make it into a story. Or you can look at it through the distance of stylization. If you take your
personal experience and turn it into a metaphor game on, you can write that autobiographical novel
again and again, and again, just write it in different clothing.
All right. Next, a good idea for you is specific that piece of advice that I said earlier you should write the
novel that only you can write the novel that you wish you could find on the shelf, but can't, that's what
this advice speaks to. Specific means often there's something about you about your interests, about
your life that you know about that no one else does or very few people know about. And that means
that you can bring a kind of interesting window for readers that is easy to you. You don't have to do a lot
of research, or if you do have to do a lot of research, it's something that you are very passionate about.
An example of this is my father is an emergency room doctor, and he's also a part time novelist. He
dabbles in the writing and I've tried for years to get him to write a book about doctors, because that's
the kind of specialized knowledge that takes years to actually take on, obviously. And yes, I could study
it as a writer, but it's not going to be anything like what he knows from living that life.
Now he has no interest in writing a novel about being an emergency room doctor because of the third
thing on this list, which is exciting. A good idea is exciting to you. A good idea is not one that you think
that your MFA advisor would like, it's not one that you think that the market will bear, is not one that
you think that your mother will probably not be as annoyed at you for writing as another idea. It's not
one that your daughter says you should write that because you're an emergency room doctor and no
one writes books about emergency room doctors. Now it's got to be be exciting to you. At the end of the
day, when you're in that chilly middle of the book, manuscript, you're up to your neck in words, the only
thing that's going to keep you warm is your passion and interest in it.
So it doesn't matter if I think that my father would write a cracking book about being a doctor. To him
that's his day job, it's not exciting, he wants to write about things that are not something he sees every
single day and that's fair. He needs to find an idea that's exciting for him. Alright. And now the last thing
on the list, this is maybe the hardest. It must exclude secondary sources. All right. What do I mean by
that? Secondary sources, I was a history major, as I said, a primary source is a letter. It's the thing that
someone in the time period wrote right then, and a secondary source is something that refers back to
that letter, a history textbook. And if you want to be a good novelist, you're writing the primary source,
you're writing an original, you're not writing something which refers heavily back to something else. So
therefore your secondary sources, your media that you love.
We all have a tendency to, especially at first ape, the media that we love when I was a small thing,
scrawny, unfriendly, a writer. I remember that I read Watership Down. We all remember this, I think,
right? Did you read the book? Did you watch the disturbing mini series? Yeah. I'll lay it out for you if you
haven't, it's a big fat book about a community of rabbits they live out in the English countryside. They
are almost human in the complexity of their culture. They go to war, they have poetry, they make art,
there's a seabird that comes into their village for some reason. Anyway, I read this book and I absolutely
loved it.
I read it again and again and again and eventually after reading it, I picked up a notebook and I began to
write a book and it was about a community of dogs in the countryside and they had a very complex
community. It was almost human. They went to war, they had a poetry and art, a random seabird came
to visit their village. It's totally different though, because they were dogs, not rabbits and dogs are
carnivores. Right, it was totally a rip off, it was totally derivative. But I didn't even think about that, I
didn't think for even one moment that I was ripping off Watership Down, I just loved this book so much
that I felt driven to write and what I wrote was exactly the same thing.
Now, the thing about writing is that when you are writing a novel, think of the whole literary world as a
conversation. The conversation was happening before you ever arrived and if you burst into the room,
here's something that someone says and you say exactly the same thing you have done absolutely
nothing but made yourself a nuisance if anything. Now, if you burst into the room, listen to, what's been
said, and then say something in response to what someone else has been said. That's amazing, you're
adding to the conversation. You're deepening it, you're making it more complicated. That's what you
want to do if you want to write something, which is inspired by our favorite works.
Now, if you're going to write something that's inspired by your favorite works, what you need to do is
interrogate it deeply. Let's imagine you're a Harry Potter fan for instance. Let's look at the things that
make Harry Potter what it is. Well, some of the things. All right. A tight friend group, right? Harry,
Hermione, the red haired one, Ron, magic versus Mughal, the magic school itself, a group of youth who
are pushed to be responsible for the greater good against their will. When you combine all of these
things with a certain priority, you get Harry Potter. Now you can take some of the things on this list and
combine them with different priorities and you'll get a thing which is kind of a rip off of Harry Potter. Or
if you want to actually write something which is joining the conversation, instead of restating the
conversation, you can instead interrogate the thing that you find most appealing about the book that
you love.
So let's think for example, that the thing that you really liked about Harry Potter is the magic school
aspect. Ask yourself, "Can I just pull out the magic school and write a book about a magic school?" Or is
it still going to feel like Harry Potter because I'm still interested in the other things that Harry Potter was
interested in when exploring the world through the magic school. What does the magic school really
stand for? What is it that I like about the magic school? Is it because it's people finding belonging in
some other world for something that they thought was unique to only them, is it because there's a door
opened and you can actually teach something which seems quite amorphous?" Ask yourself what it is
you like about each aspect and see if you can build a novel off of that instead that lets you join the
conversation instead of just saying Harry Potter, Harry Potter.
Yeah. Okay. Next. Ideas are often metaphors for other ideas. Now ideas are a product of who we are in
that moment. It's what we're living through. It's the interpersonal relationships that we're surviving. It's
what we're reading in the news it's a media we're taking on. Every idea we have is our way as writers of
processing the world that we're living through, which means that if you have multiple ideas in short
order, they're often the same idea. And actually they're thematically undifferentiated. Imagine for
instance, you have an idea over here and you go, "Should I write about this one? I'm thinking about
writing about an emergency room doctor who was disillusioned with his profession." And then over here
you have another idea. And it's, "I'm thinking about writing about a dog who has discovered that it
doesn't like barking." Okay. That's a terrible example, but thematically, those two ideas are actually the
same. They're both about two entities that are losing the faith for some reason.
What you do in this scenario is usually you need to pick the idea that you'd like the clothing of the best,
or you can also combine them into an idea which is more complex. Give the doctor a dog and see what
that story looks like. Or decide that no, with some thought it's more complex to write about the doctor
and the dog are shunting the dog off for a different time. Or you can do a third option, which is that you
can exercise the ghosts of those plot bunnies. If you haven't heard of plot bunnies before they are the
thing, which whispers in your ear, while your trying to write another novel, they say, "I'm a better idea
you should drop your novel and you should work on me. And definitely the aliens can just take care of
everyone in your current project write me."
If I get plot bunnies now, what I like to do is I like to write a short story about them. The great thing
about a short story for plot bunnies is that it serves as a great literary time capsule. It contains the idea,
the characters that you're interested in at the moment and the mood of the idea and this perfect little
thing that you can bury somewhere else and finish your project so the aliens don't come down and then
return to this capsule and see if it's still intriguing once you crack it open. I have a written Shiver from a
time capsule plot bunny, and I also wrote the Scorpio Races the same way. So it works. I promise. Okay,
moving on. I want to take a little vacation to write what you know land. Have you guys heard this
advice? Yes you have, everyone's heard this advice. Everyone's heard this advice.
It's one of those things that I don't even know where you first hear this advice, the internet whispers
with it, it's printed in books. The concept is a sound one, write what you know. It hearkens back to that
concept that a great idea for you is specific. It says that you are an expert in something and you can
write that better than anyone else. For instance, I was a competition bagpiper in college. I'll let you play
your mind over that for a moment. Competition bagpiper. It's funny you can laugh. Are you asking
yourself were we in costume? Yeah, we were. Are you asking, did you march while you were competing?
Yeah, we did. Did you ask was it 200 decibels? Probably. We were really loud. Anyway I was really good
at it too. Okay. The point is that I'm a competition bagpiper. What's a competition bagpiper? That makes
me somewhat of an expert on bag piping. That means technically that I could write about bag piping
more accurately than someone who doesn't write about bag piping.
I generally believe in this concept. However, I do think, write which you know is a bit of a limited piece
of advice. Yeah. I think that the problem is that when I heard this piece of advice, when I was a young
writer, I found it absolutely crushing because who was I, what did I know? I was just some teenager that
was in the middle of nowhere. I was a Navy brat. I was socially awkward. Was scrawny and unfriendly. I
mean, what did I know? Did I want to write that experience? No. I wanted to write all kinds of crazy
adventures, but does write what you know, mean that I can't write things that I haven't done myself?
No.
The thing about write what you know is you need to remember that it's mostly about your emotional
experience. Write what you know is, if I thought about myself as a young, isolated pup in the middle of
nowhere, living out on a farm, surrounded by corn field, what did I know? I knew what it was like to be
living untouched by any civilization. Write what you know could mean that I could write that emotional
experience on a spaceship. I was a Navy brat. So we moved 18 times before I was 18. And family was the
most important thing to me. Write what you know could mean that I wrote about being a Navy brat or it
could mean that I wrote about what it meant for your family to be the closest thing to you. Like the
Scorpio Races.
A thing about write what you know, what you need to recognize as far as its limitations is that if you
adhere to it, unthinkingly projects like Watership down or Finding Nemo or Wally can't exist because it
turns out that rabbit writers and robot writers and fish writers are very thin on the ground. So imagine
widely, remember what your emotional experiences and write that because that's in your pocket. All
right. The last thing we're going to cover and ideas is this mood. Yeah. This is where I checked back in to
mood. Idea plus mood is going to get us further down the flow chart. And we're going to talk about that
next item on the list in the next video.
VIDEO 4:
Here's my question to you, are you a crier? Are you one of those folks who when you get to a big
moment in a book, sad or happy your feelings come out of your face? Are you one of those people that
goes into the movie theater and the music swells and Wonder Woman is running and your feelings
come out of your face? Are you one of those people that when the SPCA commercial comes on and
Sarah McLaughlin is singing sweetly as dogs look at you with big glowing eyes, you begin to cry? Yeah,
I'm not. I'm not even sure I have fully functional tier ducks to tell you the truth. I am really a non-crier. I
do not cry at movies. I don't cry at books. I'm actually like the designated non-crier for movie watching.
We can go and see an incredibly sad movie and I am the one that can be allowed to drive because I don't
have tears misting my face. Yeah. A non-crier. I know you guys are surprised, right?
Yeah. I've actually only cried over one book in my life to tell you the truth and it is The Time Traveler's
Wife. I don't know if you've read it. It's a big fat book. I've read it twice. This is an important fact for you
to remember, because the story that I'm about to relay happened after I read it for the second time.
Reading it for the second time means I knew how it was going to end and as I was reading along, even
knowing how it was going to end I started to cry and not even the nice, sweet little, droop, droop tears
where your spouse looks over at you and says, "Oh sweetie, you look so vulnerable when you weep."
No, it was the snot bubble weather event kind of crying. Yeah. It went on all evening.
The kids and the dogs were hiding under the table. I went through the seven stages of grief. My husband
kept on saying things like, "I thought you said you never cry at books?" And I was throwing things at him.
Yeah. Anyway, it went on, like I said, all evening, all night. And the next morning, when I finally came to
the last stage of grief, acceptance, I said to myself, all right, here's the deal. I'm going to write a book
that is so poignant, the character is so three-dimensional, the situation so dire that it's going to ruin
someone else's evening. Yeah. I'm going to write a book that when someone is reading it in public, like
on a train or in school, they're going to get to the end and their face is going to be a ruin of snot and
tears. They'll shake their fist at the heavens and say, "Why Maggie, Steve [inaudible 00:03:17], why?
Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. It was a vicious cycle. The book made me cry. I had to make someone
else cry. But most importantly, what I'd actually done is that I entered the first stage of that flow chart
that I was telling you about. I had received the mood. My next project was going to be a bittersweet love
story. I already knew my goal. My goal was to make readers cry. That meant that every idea that came
up after that, I was going to see through the lens of making people cry like little infants in public. So it
took a while for an idea to come along. All of this bittersweet love story percolated in the back of my
mind, which was fine because at the time I was working on promoting my upcoming novel, which was
my debut about homicidal fairies and Celtic music, Limit is the name of it. Now this was put out by a
pretty small press, so I was pretty hungry for promotional opportunities.
I thought a great way to get my name out there would be to enter a short story contest I think, a
paranormal short story contest. I wonder if I can find one? Well, the only one I could find within that
time period was a short story contest for werewolves. That makes it sound like only werewolves could
enter. And I'm not a werewolf. I'm not a werewolf. I'm not a werewolf.
It was supposed to be about werewolves, 2000 words about werewolves. Now you should know that at
the time I was not a big fan of werewolves. And I understand that when I say that you are laughing and
shaking your head as my first major trilogy was about werewolves, but here's my feelings about
werewolves, especially at the time, they were shedders, they were slobbers and also, I just felt like the
metaphor of werewolves was played out. The whole idea behind werewolves was that they a metaphor
for giving into your beastly side and looking around at my fellow Americans I thought, nope, I think
we've got that covered. Yeah, werewolves, we didn't need him anymore. As far as I was concerned, but
you know what? I only had to put up with werewolves for 2000 words. I could surely come up with a
Stiefvater spin on werewolves, I thought.
It took forever. I tried to think of a new metaphor for werewolves, an interesting spin on them and I had
absolutely nothing. All I felt was that I'd wasted work days and I'd gotten nowhere. Now that night,
however, I fell asleep and I had a dream, not about werewolves, about wolves, a pack of wolves. They
were attacking a little girl in the snow. It was a very vivid image. I could see it from above her laying in
the snow and the blood and the werewolves, no the regular wolves. That part is important to make a
distinction because when I woke up, I thought, you know what? I am really not that much into
werewolves, but I am really into wolves. I am really into nature in fact. I'm really into the dissonance
between humanity and nature and that is a thing that I could write about. What if I don't have
werewolves?
What if I just have people who are sometimes humans and sometimes wolves? That's a short story I
could write. So I wrote the short story and it was fine. Whatever. It did not win a prize, but still was
there percolating that concept of bittersweet love story and werewolves, or actually humans who were
sometimes wolves. Now at the same time, I was getting ready to write the sequel to Lament, which was
another YA novel that follows teens. I had conveniently avoided school scenes in the first book by
setting it over the summer, but the next book took place in the fall and it seemed unlikely I could
continue avoiding school forever. Now, the reason why I wanted to avoid school was because had been
homeschooled from sixth grade on and I never went to high school so I had no idea what high school
was like.
I was completely faking it. However, I realized that I needed to figure out what high school was all about
instead of just writing about high school via The Breakfast Club, because as a YA author, you cannot
avoid high school scenes forever. So I told schools that I would come in and give them an author
presentation for free as long as they in exchange gave me a posse of student ambassadors who would
lead me around for the rest of the day so I could see what it was all like. Here's what it was like, hell.
High school is hell. I understand now. I didn't do all high school visits. I also did a couple of middle school
visits. And middle schools, especially early middle schools, man, I loved them. They were weirdos.
Middle schoolers were ... I mean, they dressed strange. They talked strange. They were into strange
hobbies that they wanted to tell you about at length.
They would say, "I collect every gobbledy goop card ever. Do you want to see them? I've named myself
after them." And then you would hear all about their gobbledy goop card collection as you saw all of
their gobbledy goop friends. Anyway, they were amazing weirdos. They smelled, they didn't even care
that they smelled. Awesome. Anyway, high school though, high school was a completely different story,
especially in the 2000's when this was happening. Everyone there was dressed identically in
Abercrombie and Fitch. That should tell you exactly what time period this was, everyone. There was no
sign of the weirdos anywhere, no gobbledygook cards at all. I remember one super high school in
Northern Virginia I visited. It was massive, 3000 senior high students all under one roof. The center aisle
was half a mile long. And when the bell rang between classes, it was like Mufasa's death scene. My first
thought upon seeing the stream of senior high students in Abercrombie and Fitch was, I would have
never survived high school. And my next thought was, did they kill the middle schoolers?
No. They had not killed the middle schoolers. Of course, as you know, those of you who went to high
school, know exactly what happened to them, especially if you went to high school in 2009 or whatever.
Instead, these weird funky middle schoolers had adopted the protective coloration of every other
student that was there to avoid being battered in the halls of high school. To belong they had stripped
off all the interesting parts of their identities and instead they'd all become the same, not really the
same, because they would whisper to me at the end of the day. "Do you want to see my gobbledy goop
card?" And I thought, this is criminal. This is terrible. These guys are putting their lives on hold because
they're missing out on all of the strange community. They're not going to see their people again until
college when they get over looking like everyone else and they find their gobbledy goop card club.
Anyway. So it struck me that I wanted to write something that was about identity, about giving identity
away, about who you are and what it means to lose it. And that got added on to my idea for Shiver. Now
the final part of Shiver that fell into place was, all right, I knew I wanted to write a bittersweet love story
about people who sometimes were wolves, who were losing their identities to being wolves. And I
thought, but what I need is I need the piece that tells me how they shift. I need to know what triggers it.
I don't want them to shift every single month because if the book is going to be about losing your
identity and my goal is to make people cry buckets, well, it's not going to work if they only lose their
identity for a month or during the full moon, it's got to be longer than that. So what can I find that's
natural and cyclical? The weather. And then it fell into place. This idea of people who turned into wolves
every single winter and lost their form for longer and longer every time they turn into a Wolf. And then I
had Shiver. And I'm telling you all of this now because we've moved down the flow chart from mood to
idea and now we're on the third item, premise.
Okay. So what is premise? I understand it's a bit of a semantics argument. Some people might use the
words idea and premise interchangeably, but to me, I think that a premise is when an idea gets enough
weight and complexity to become a promise. When an idea finally gets enough details added to it, that I
can see the book that it's promising to be. Most importantly, an idea becomes a premise when it has
enough specificity and details around it that I can see all of the books that it's not going to be. Novel
writing is a run down a hallway and the more doors are shut, the fewer rooms I have to stick my heads
and do along the way. All right, premise. Premise is also this math, okay.
Mood plus idea equals premise. Now, if you look back at that story, I told you about how the Shiver
came to be, I gave you most of that flow chart that I'm going to go through for the rest of this seminar
actually, which is that I went through the mood and then I went to the idea and then I went through
some theme added onto the premise and then I ended up with a setting because of the cold and the
winter. However, the book actually came into play very early in that. Once you added mood and idea to
each other, that became the book, bittersweet love story and werewolf that's Shiver in a nutshell. That
became my touchstone. That's the book that I knew that I was going to write. That's the book that I
could play in my mind over and over again, because now I could see the shape of it at the end of the
road.
I want to take a moment now to invite you guys to daydream, to give you permission to daydream. I
want you to think about the book in your head, the one that made you sign up for this seminar. You're
working on it, or you're thinking about working on it. It's an idea it's haunting you, or maybe a new idea
that you haven't touched. I want you to take a moment to think about it in your hands. Close your eyes
if you have to. Don't look at my face. Instead imagine you have the book in your hands. I want you to
think about what the title might be. I want you to think about what the font of the title would be. I want
you to think about what the cover art would look like, how fat that book feels in your hands. I want you
to think about when you open that first page and you look at the paragraph, what does the reader feel
when they're reading that first paragraph? Are they intrigued? Are they terrified? Do they feel nostalgic?
Is it comfortable?
I want you to then think about what the reader feels when they get to the final in that book. Are they
satisfied? Are they crying buckets in public? Is thrilling? I want you to go even further beyond that
though. I want you to imagine that your book has been adapted into a film and you are sitting in the
perfect seat in the theater and the title is on the screen and music is playing. I want you to think about
what that title credit looks like. I want you to think about what the music sounds like when it's playing.
Now, I realize this might sound like an indulgent thought exercise, but really all of these decisions, even
though most of them are not in your play as an author, you're not going to be able to pick the cover art.
You don't pick the font for the title. You aren't going to know what the music playing in the movie. The
reason why I want you to just think about them though, is because all of those decisions are made by
creatives along the way based upon the genre of your book. They are signaling what your book is to
other people. The cover art tells you one thing. The title tells you if it's a thriller or a romance. The music
tells you how to feel. And the more you can conceptualize all of these things in the future, the more
you're deciding for yourself what your book is going to be. And once you have idea plus mood, once you
have premise, that's when you can start to hold that book in your hands. I could start to hold Shiver in
my hands and imagine what that bittersweet love story would look like as I handed it to a reader.
Okay, you can open your eyes now. I'm back, right? Sometimes that math though, doesn't quite work.
Sometimes mood plus idea does not equal premise. Sometimes you need this math instead, mood plus
idea, plus idea equals premise. Sometimes, especially with a longer book, a more complex book or a
series you're going to need more. You have to keep on sticking things onto it, just like with Shiver, which
is still a pretty simple book, just having werewolves plus bitter sweet love story wasn't quite enough.
Once you add in the concept of identity, then you start getting into a more fuller picture. Now, when
you get to something like the Raven Cycle, that's such a complex project that any single idea didn't give
you the fullness of what the book was actually going to look like. It didn't give me enough idea in my
head of what I was going to be holding, so that could continue down the flow chart.
So for the longest time, it existed in ideas in corners and different projects, because I knew if I started
any single one of them, the aliens would come down and kill everyone. If you've read the Raven Cycle,
I'd like you to take a moment to imagine what that might've looked like. Right, but the aliens didn't
come down because I started combining ideas together and that's something I suggest to you. So the
ideas that I combined for the Raven Cycle were things like a whose family can bring things out of
dreams, a girl who was the only non psychic in a psychic family, a privileged boy who goes on medieval
quest, a forest that contains all seasons. All of these were ideas that I had kept in different corners,
some of them for years, some of them trying to combine them, never finding exactly the right
combination.
And it was only when I finally stuck them all together, along with the mood I was looking for, eerie
nostalgia, that I finally got to a book that I could picture in my hands, and then I could brainstorm down
the rest of my flow chart. So if you feel like you're not quite ready to move further along with your idea,
ask yourself, is there another idea that I can add to it? I'd like to ask you guys now to participate in a
brief exercise in premise making. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you an idea and I want you
guys to play around with the concepts that I've just talked about, making an idea into a premise. Now
I'm giving you an idea to play with in this exercise because I feel like it's easier to play a game like this if
the stakes are lower.
And if I'm giving you the idea, instead of asking you to use one of your existing ones, I feel like the stakes
are nice and low. That will make you nice and nimble. The idea is this, everyone aged 24 disappears for
24 hours. You got it? Everyone aged 24 disappears for 24 hours. That's the idea. You can see, I think,
how it falls into the description of ideas are the tiniest building block for a novel because I think if you
play your mind over it, even though you might at first go, oh right, sure there's obvious drama in that.
You can actually see how it can be many different novels with that idea at its heart. Everyone aged 24
disappears for 24 hours. Imagine how different this novel becomes if it's a horror. Imagine if it is a
comedy. Imagine if it's a bittersweet love story.
Imagine if it's a Gothic romance. These all become different novels. I want you to cycle this idea through
various moods in your head. And a great way to think of what mood you might be in the mood to
actually write is think about what you've been reading lately, watching lately, what you've been hungry
for lately. Can you just take that mood and create something else in that genre? Stick that idea onto it.
Everyone 24 disappears for 24 hours. Now what I want you to do as you're playing this exercise out in
your mind is ask yourself, all right, what information do I feel like I have? What information do I feel like
I'm missing? Do I feel like I know enough to be able to go further down the flow chart or do I need more
information added onto this? Do I need more decisions made before I can even open up what this
concept of a novel would look like in my hands?
I want you also to think, all right, is this like the Raven boys? Do I need to add another idea onto this in
order to get far enough that I can actually imagine what the book will be? When you're imagining other
ideas to stick onto this I want you to think about disparate ideas, not ideas that seem like they should
just automatically follow, instead ones that widen up your premise and make it exciting and surprising.
So for instance, everyone, 24 disappeared for 24 hours. Imagine if you combined that with an idea like a
disastrous space journey or historical shape shifters, possibly a young lawyer who wants to prove
himself, a talking dog, a disastrous wedding that no one wants to go to, a corrupt grad school. If you
attach any of these to the idea that everyone 24 disappears for 24 hours, you get a very different novel.
And I want you guys to play pretend in your mind until you come up with a novel that you can picture in
your head and ask yourself again, how did I get to what I need to go on with this? What storytelling
options do I seem to find favorable? And then apply those to your idea that you already have when you
came to the seminar.
VIDEO 5:
We've been together for about an hour now talking about writing, and we've covered mood, idea, and
premise. Throughout this entire thing, I've kind of been hammering on the idea that the natural form of
story is up here, thought, where it can be amorphous, and boundaryless, and pure. I've also really
hammered on the idea that I try and keep my brainstorming up here as long as possible, because I know
that the moment I begin to write anything down, I'll begin to limit my imagination into what words can
contain. Nowhere has this concept really stood out more than when I was brainstorming for The Scorpio
Races. I don't know if you've read it or not, but it's my favorite of my novels, so you should read it, but
don't tell me if you don't like it because I don't want to know. Actually, I don't care. I don't care if you
don't like it, because I'll love it for both of us.
Right. So The Scorpio Races, like most of my novels, began with a mood, but the mood for The Scorpio
Races, in my head, was too big and complicated to actually be put into words. Instead, it was held in my
head by an image. An image, after all, as the old saying goes, is worth 1,000 words. And in this case, the
image that held the mood for The Scorpio Races was this. It was just a still figure, a dark rider, on top of
a blood red horse, galloping along a white beach at the base of White Chalk Cliffs. That was the image in
my head. Everything that that contained was contained in the mood. All of the feelings of what it was
like to live in a place like that with a horse, that wildness, that freedom, the starkness of it, was
contained in that image. That was the mood.
Now, I had this mood floating around in my head for quite a while, but I couldn't dive into it even if I
wanted to, because at the time, I was up to my neck in The Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy, and I was
touring all the time. I was actually touring one day out of every three, so I basically lived on airplanes.
What I did, however, was I became obsessed with this idea of finding the cliffs that were in this image.
So as I traveled all over the world for the Shiver series, I always tried to take detours wherever I was to
see if there were cliffs within a couple of hours. If I was in California, I saw cliffs there. If I was in Ireland,
I saw cliffs there. If I was in the UK, I saw cliffs there. I saw the cliffs of Dover. I saw cliffs in the County of
York. I saw cliffs everywhere. Everywhere.
I think the worst example of this actually was that at one point I was touring in France. I was in Paris. It
was in December, I remember, because it was very close to my wedding anniversary, and I also
remember that I had my husband with me. Now, this was a very unusual situation. Normally I had to
tour by myself, but this time I had him with me, and it was also unusual because we were there in Paris
and it was beginning to snow. In fact, my event was called off because of snow. My French editor said to
me, "Maggie, you know what? You're here in Paris. It's just a couple of days until your wedding
anniversary. It's Christmas season. You're here with your husband and this is the city of love and it's
snowing in this city for the first time in 18 years. You know what? Take him. Take him and go. Go and
see the City of Love with him. Renew your vows." And so I turned to my husband and I said, "Lover, rent
a car. We're driving to the cliffs of Normandy."
So it's possible that Paris, the City of Love looks beautiful in the snow, but I wouldn't know because I
wasn't there. I was checking out the cliffs of Normandy. It turned out that those were not the cliffs that I
needed, but they were cool cliffs. Yeah. Eventually, I did find my cliffs. They were very similar to the cliffs
that were near Scarborough in the UK. But still, the point remains, that image, I went looking for it. And
that brings us to the next section on my flow chart, which is when we are looking at this. Setting.
I often tell my friends that I think of writing as holding a huge bundle of balloons, helium balloons. I
imagine it as one of those things like the movie Up, just hundreds upon hundreds of balloons. I'm
clinging to them tightly, and then sometimes against my will, I'm focusing so much on keeping most of
them that a couple of balloons escape. I just can't think about all of them. Off they go. Acceptable
losses. Sorry. I've still got 399 balloons, so I guess I'm doing okay. But I've lost one of them. That's the
pacing balloon or maybe the, oh, do you remember that characters have siblings balloon or the, I
remember that weather happens balloon. These things are just gone. And I often feel like setting is one
of those balloons that new writers often forget to hold on to.
I can see how it's easy to do with some ideas. Now, don't get me wrong, some ideas and premises, they
just come automatically with a setting that you have to use or one that's just automatically
recommended. But there are a lot of ideas and premises that could happen in many places. And so new
writers will often have them happen in any places, in every town USA, just the suburbs, just a place in
the US; there's a Walmart and a highway and a big high school, and it's kind of unidentifiable. Or
sometimes they'll do the slightly more specific version of this, which is they'll set it in their hometown
because they figure, "Oh, well, I don't have to research then because I know where everything is and I
won't get anything wrong." Fine. Done. Which is not a wrong answer, it's just not a thought out answer.
It's not a right answer. It doesn't answer the question of, what is the why of your setting?
Setting and mood are so tightly interconnected that for the longest time, I thought they were the same
thing. They can lean on each other so heavily. Setting can influence mood, mood can influence setting,
back and forth. Imagine your favorite books set someplace completely different. Imagine Harry Potter,
only, in a space station. Imagine The Scorpio Races, but in San Diego. Imagine The Raven Boys, but
taking place deep in New York City instead of in the wilds of Virginia. Are any of these settings wrong?
No, they're just different. The ideal setting is one that allows you to explore the elements of your
premise and idea that you want to explore. At this point, don't limit yourself with what's realistic.
Instead, just ask yourself, what's the coolest?
All right. Here we are again in this place. This place. The write what you know place. Now I know what
you're thinking. You're thinking, but Maggie, you just told me that I shouldn't just fall into putting my
book set in my town or whatever it is. So now you're going to say, write what you know? No. We're
going to talk again about how write what you know is talking about your emotional experience instead.
So when I was looking all over the world for cliffs that were going to fit my book for The Scorpio Races,
what was I looking for? Was I looking for accuracy? A lot of times writers go looking for accuracy. They
say, I've got to visit locations to make sure I get everything right. And you know what? That's fine. That's
valid. But it's also not why readers read books.
Most of the time, readers don't care if they can use your novel to accurately guide themselves to the
Wendy's on the corner of Third and Main, because you've done it so well. Instead, they care about the
truth of the setting. Not accuracy, but truth. The emotional experience of what it is to be in a place. How
many times have you read a novel that takes place similar to where you live and you're like, that's not
what it's like there? You aren't talking about the fact that there's a Wendy's in the wrong place. You're
talking about the fact that it doesn't feel true to the social truths, to the emotional truths of what it's
like to live there.
So when I say write what you know, what I want you to do is to interrogate your own of what you do
know, where you have lived. I'm not telling you that if your book takes place in France, you need to head
to France to see what the City of Love looks like while it's snowing outside. In fact, this seminar was
recorded during lockdown, so probably, I would advise against that unless you're already in the City of
Love. In which case, is it snowing there? I hope not. It's June. Right.
What I'm asking you to do instead is to think about the places that you've lived and ask yourself what
makes it feel true? What makes it feel specific? Think about the town or the city that you've lived in and
think about how you interact with your neighbors, with the people who are beyond your neighbors, with
strangers, with friend people. Are you one of those communities that you wave at people when you go
down the country roads? Are you one of those people that does the gentle tap, tap honk when you are
sitting at the light for too long? What is your place known for? What does it feel like? And I want you to
be able to lift that up so that you can take the bits that you need and transfer them onto another
location so it will feel true.
I talked before, in the very first write what you know section, about what I knew as a Navy brat living in
the middle of nowhere. I talked about how I could use that farming community that I lived in to also
transfer that emotional experience to a distant spaceship. What can you transfer your various emotional
experiences of setting and location to in your book? That specificity of experience, that specificity of
your emotional experience, is where you actually have value in write what you know. Yes, also the
Wendy's on the corner of third and Main. That's fine. But only if it's a really cool Wendy's.
I want to talk briefly about how genre and setting interact as well. One of my writer friends asked me
what I thought the difference was between The Raven Cycle and its spinoff series, The Dreamer trilogy,
namely the first book in The Dreamer trilogy Call Down the Hawk. I wasn't exactly sure how to answer
her, but then a couple of weeks later, I was driving along through the Shenandoah Valley where The
Raven cycle is set, and I saw a man headed to the grocery store. He was on a ride on lawnmower headed
into the Walmart.
Now, it's not a totally uncommon thing to see in the Valley because people can lose their driver's
licenses for all kinds of interesting reasons out here in the middle of nowhere. But it's kind of a thing, a
Valley thing, to see a guy in a seed cap going to pick up some cereal on his ride on mower, in the turn
lane. Yeah. And I thought to myself, that. That's the difference between The Raven Cycle and The
Dreamer trilogy. I could put that moment in The Raven Cycle and there is no room for it in The Dreamer
trilogy.
And the difference is genre. The Raven Cycle is this lush, Gothic, contemporary fantasy that's very
interested in the theme of what is home and finding your true home and how home can feel like
something that's settled inside your bones. And it takes place in Virginia and it's very interested in
looking at what it means to take place in Virginia. What it means to grow up there, what it means to
land there, just what it looks like all around. It's very interested in taking the camera and looking at little
vignettes. So yeah, you would be able to kind of glance out of the corner of your eye, take a moment to
nod to the guy in the seed cap heading off to the Walmart on his ride on mower.
The Dreamer trilogy has no time for that. It's a totally different genre. It's not quite a thriller, it's a little
too character-driven for that. But it's very interested in its plot and its mysteries and its eerie mood. It
does not have time to be looking out the back of the window at some guy on a tractor. No way. It's
going to be looking at instead straight ahead towards the next plot point. And if it is not looking at a plot
point, it's looking up here inside the characters' thought processes instead.
So that's one of the things that you should look at as you're doing your research for your setting. There's
no point, as you set the location, right now, in really throwing yourself into research, unless you know
exactly how much of that research you're going to need. Because if you're writing a really tightly paced
thriller, you're not going to need the same kind of minutia that you'll need if you're doing a slow paced,
literary novel, that is very interested in the lush farming community it takes place in.
Okay, exercise time. I realize that makes it sound like I want you guys to get out of your chair and do
some jumping jacks. And maybe you should. If you've been watching this video straight through, you
definitely should. Don't you have to pee or something? Go and get a glass of water, shake out your
hands. Go, go, go, pause. Go. Right. Okay. So the exercise that I actually mean though, is a setting
exercise. Now, I started this segment off talking about how valuable I think it is to keep all of your
brainstorming in your head at this point. And I really, really think it's true when it comes to setting,
because we definitely, as creators, tend to have default settings. And I mean, not settings like locations,
but buttons on a screen, default settings of what we like to place the camera looking at.
We have default locations, we have default kinds of personal relationships we like to look at. We have
default plot shapes that we're interested in. And we can just fall into those grooves again and again and
again if we're not careful. Taking a moment now to really ask ourselves, okay, do I know what setting I
want to put this in, encourages us to think outside the box. So I'd like you to take that idea that we've
been rolling around for the last hour and a half, everyone aged 24 disappears for 24 hours, and I want
you to imagine it with your premise and your mood that you've been working with in a bunch of
different settings. In particular, when you roll through these settings, and again, it's a nice low stakes
game because it's someone else's idea, as you roll through these settings, I want you to notice how
some settings automatically make the premise seem bigger, they expand the novel, and others make it
instantly feel naturally more intimate.
So for instance, if you put it onto a military base on Mars, that suggests somewhat of a larger story than
if you make it take place entirely within the walls of a grocery store. So I want you to take a moment and
really let your mind imagine a whole bunch of different locations and think about the permutations and
what it does to the story. And again, ask yourself what kinds of stories do you find yourself drawn to?
What kind of questions do you still want answered? Are there any particular locations that immediately
shut you down and make you disinterested in this game again? And think widely. Don't fall into your
comfort zone. Imagine, again, it's underwater. Imagine it's taking place in 16th century Japan. Imagine
it's taking place at the Olympics. Imagine it takes place at New York City. Imagine it takes place in a tiny
farming community. What does this do to the shape of that idea? Everyone aged 24 disappears for 24
hours. And then take your own idea, and even if it's an old one that's been set in the same place forever,
play the exact same game.
VIDEO 6:
All right. We've talked about mood, idea, premise and setting in this grand flow chart of things that I
have to contemplate before I'm allowed to write a single word into a manuscript, lest the aliens come
down, and kill everyone. But I wanted to take a moment before I moved on to the next item on the list
to talk about the timeline of the flow chart. How long is the ideal time to spend on moving through the
flow chart before getting into the manuscript? It's a trick question. Spoiler, trick question. There is no
ideal timeline, ha ha, fooled you.
The truth is this. I'm a professional novelist and I'm always juggling multiple projects at the same time.
And so now, budding novels will often spend lots of time on the back burner in one of these stages. But
that doesn't mean that I need for them to sit on the back burner for months or even years. Although
some ideas do require that amount of percolation, but no, not all of them. Some projects, the idea will
come to me and days later I'll already be ready to be putting some chicken scratch into a manuscript.
There is no ideal length of time to let a novel percolate, to let it develop.
The only thing that's actually ideal is that you find a process that lets you go through all of these steps in
an order which makes sense to you, that makes the game fun, that answers enough questions about
your novel, that you are well set up to start writing into a draft that actually gets you somewhere. That's
the only right answer for the timeline and for the structure of the flow chart.
Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, we're going to go to the next item in my flow chart,
which is this. Story. What is story? Story is everything. In commercial fiction, it's everything. It's the most
important thing. It's the thing that most readers care about the most though, ironically, it's also the
thing that many authors care about the least. Story is the tune. It's the hummable bit. Some listeners
don't need for their songs to be catchy, especially if it's in their genre, right? They'll stick it on their
playlist, that deep jazz solo or whatever it is because it matches everything else. It gives them what they
want in the feelings department. But most people, they want it to be a little bit catchy. And the truth is
that if your story is catchy enough, even if it's not quite in people's genre wheelhouse, it will become
something that they will pick up. Everyone knows how to sing Great Balls of Fire or whatever, even if
that's not the kind of music they normally listen to.
So if you want to write truly commercial fiction, you've got to have a hook. You've got to have story,
beginning, middle, and end. I remind myself that the things that I'm often interested in exploring in my
novel, the character arcs, the theme, the mood, those things are important, but they're also noise.
They're the timbre, they're the proof. The story has to be the skeleton that holds the reader in.
Okay. So in commercial fiction, what is story? It's this. It's conflict, it's exploration or it's change. You'll
notice I just said or, it can be conflict or exploration or change, but generally in most commercial fiction,
it's a combination of all of these things. What we're looking for is a beginning, a middle and end. What
we're looking for is for the reader to feel like they've accomplished something from beginning to end,
that story.
It's about at this stage of brainstorming that I start thinking about choosing a camera. I don't mean
choosing a main character, choosing a point of view, that's too specific. Instead, it's just that I have now
learned enough about my story idea, that I can look at it and ask myself what facets of this am I most
interested in looking at and what kinds of people might make good characters for me to look at that
with? There's no right or wrong answer, but who you choose, the kind of point of view that you choose
will give you a drastically different story. So for instance, my debut novel Lament, if you haven't read it,
it's about a shy teen in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, who is very musically talented. And she attracts
the attention, because she is so talented, of dangerous fairies, including a fairy assassin. Now, I told that
story from the point of view of her, the girl who was attracting the attention of the fairies. I wanted to
look at the relationship with her overbearing mother and I wanted to write about her relationship with
her own skills and her fears.
And so it made sense to look at the world through her eyes, but she's not the only choice I could have
made. I could have thought about tying the story from the point of view of her best friend, who was
watching her struggle with the fairies, which I did in the sequel. I could have told the story from the
point of view of the fairies, watching this human interloper above ground. I could have told the story
from the point of view of the assassin. That's a good idea. I could have told the story from the point of
view of her dog. Actually, that's also a fun idea. I could have told the story from the point of view of her
overbearing mother, seen without the lens of daughter feeling put upon, watching her daughter be
slowly lured away by the fairies. All of these are very different novels of a pretty simple plot.
So you can see how turning the vase just a little bit gives you a very different view. I mean, you can play
this game with stuff that you know very well. Imagine Jurassic Park, told from the point of view of only
the hospital staff who is treating the folks that were attacked by dinosaurs. Imagine Jurassic Park that
was being told by the dinosaurs. Imagine Harry Potter, but seen through the eyes of the teachers or the
Muggles. Imagine Twilight told from the point of view of the biology teacher. The camera you choose
gives you a wildly different story. And again, there's no right or wrong answer. The only right answer is
the camera that allows you to look at the parts of the premise that you want to explore and matches all
of the decisions you've made before that point, especially checking back into mood.
Hollywood is a strange place. I'm allowed to say that because I don't really exist in Hollywood as a
novelist, a best selling novelist. I'm just kind of adjacent to it. We sometimes run into each other on the
street and I sort of wave at them in the way that you might wave at a bear on a unicycle. You're not sure
what's happening, but it's interesting. And you'd like for it to wave back, if it can, it did. Right.
Hollywood's strange. Book industry makes sense to me. If you sell a book, you can be fairly sure that a
couple of years later the book will come out after you've done your developmental process. Now, if you
sell your rights to Hollywood though, who knows what will happen. Instead, what they do is they pay
money for something called an option, which means they have the option to think about making your
book into movie or television.
And they sit around a lot and talk about it. And it's all very exciting and there's bears on unicycles. And
then at the end of the option period, they say, "Okay, yes, we're going to do it." And they either
continue thinking about it or they actually do it. Or they say, "No, no, nevermind, nevermind." Anyway, I
actually have had the luxury of having most of my projects option by Hollywood at one time or another.
At one point, one of those Hollywood mags actually ran a piece on me that said Maggie Stiefvater,
Hollywood's darling, which I thought was a very strange title for me to have, considering that they never
made any of my books into movies. They just kept on running the bear with the unicycle through the
set.
Anyway, so I've had a fair number of brushes with Hollywood and Shiver was actually optioned way back
when. It actually got pretty far in the process, they optioned it, they thought about it. We had a director
sort of, we had a screenwriter who wrote a draft and they sent me the draft and said, "Let us know what
you think." So I read this draft and I don't know if you've read Shiver, but you should know from
watching this seminar, that my goal when writing Shiver was write a bittersweet love story that would
make people cry buckets in public places. That was the goal. And I like to think that that's pretty much
what the book is. It's a kissing book. I'm happy with it. I mean, it's a very cold, snowy kissing book with
werewolves. Perfect. When I read this draft, all of the names were the same. There was still Sam, there
was still Grace. It still took place in Minnesota. There were still werewolves. They still changed
temperature with the weather mostly, but they'd made some changes.
Now I understand making changes to adapt it to the screen, but this particular script changed it. So that
Sam and Grace, the couple that experiences true love in Shiver, destined to be together, really, they
start out the movie dating other people, which I thought was an interesting choice. I thought, well, how
are we going to fall into love if we're dating other people that feels a little different. Not to worry.
Because part of the way through our script, we actually had Shelby, one of the werewolves from the
book make a sudden appearance and she killed off Grace's love interest, not as a wolf, she stabbed him
to death. His name was Dustin. She stabbed Dustin and the scene was framed so that we could see it
through a window. And the stabbing was a silhouette of him going down. And they said that the light
overhead was swinging over the blood spattered walls.
And my first thought was, what a way to go. You're killed in your teens by a werewolf, but while they're
a teen girl and they stab you. Dustin, I thought you were on a football team. Dustin. Anyway, I tell you
this story for starters, because I should tell you that you don't have a lot of opportunities in this world to
prove yourself as a good person or a bad person, because there's not really any objectivity in the world
when it comes to good person or bad person. However, this does represent a moment in my life where I
felt like I was a good person, because at the end of the option, the script was turned in very close to the
end of it. They came to me and they said, Hey, Maggie, Maggie. And the bear goes by on the unicycle.
And they said, so we really are still very into your project. And we want to go ahead with it. And we've
got everything in place. Do you want some more money for us to make it, to extend this option?
And I said, are you going to use that script? And they said, yeah, it's a great script. And in my mind, I fast
forwarded. And I thought about all of the readers who loved Shiver, had cried buckets over it in public
watching an adaptation of Shiver that involved Dustin being stabbed in a small room by Shelby. And I
looked at the bag of money that the bear on the unicycle was holding out and there was good angel on
my shoulder and there was bad devil. And I said, "No, I don't like money, you can just go." See, I was a
good person. I was a good person. I lodge that in my heart.
The other reason why I tell you this story is because we're in the middle of this segment on story and
talking about mood, how much mood can change a story, even when almost everything else is the same.
Genre dictates story choices, mood dictates story choices. So Shiver could have been a horror by just
changing the smallest number of things. It's important to continue checking back into what you intend.
So you don't get mired down along the way and end up being killed by a teenage werewolf while on the
form of a scrawny girl.
VIDEO 7:
Now at this point of story making, I am still not writing anything down. I am still worried about those
aliens coming down and killing everyone. Actually, at this point, what I'm really worried about is getting
bogged down in logistics, running into some seemingly unfixable logical problem that stops me in my
brainstorming tracks. So to avoid this, I just stay as far away from logic as possible. Refusing to write
things down is a great way to stay away from logic. What I'm looking at right now though is I am looking
at how passive or active my story choices are. I'm looking for the most active form of my story, generally
speaking in commercial fiction. A good way to think about the difference between a passive story and an
active story is to think about passive voice and active voice in grammar. If you're not a grammar nerd,
that's okay, I am. When I was a kid, I used to love to do those diagrams of sentences. I still do them for
fun sometimes now.
Okay I'm back. Right, grammar. Passive voice, active voice. We're told as writers to avoid the passive
voice, but why? Passive voice would be something like this, "She was given a house" versus active voice
which is, "She bought a house." Or no, let's reverse that again. Passive voices is "She was given a house",
active version would be "Her sister gave her a house." You see how it twists it around. In passive voice,
the subject is being acted upon. She's sitting there passively and someone gives her a house. Who is this
person by the way, in my example? I would like for someone to give me a house, wouldn't you like to be
given a house? Unless it's one of those haunted numbers. No, probably even then I'd take a haunted
house. If any of you want to give me your haunted houses, I'm here for you. Back to passive voice.
She was given a house, she's sitting there, she does nothing to gain this house. It was given to her. So
who is the real actor in this situation? Whoever is the one giving her the house. So therefore the active
version of that sentence is her sister or whoever was the house giver, gave her the house. What we're
looking for when we're creating heroes, when we're shaping stories in commercial fiction is generally,
we are looking for a subject who is doing a thing. Now they don't have to start out as doing the thing.
Hero shape is often moving from being passive to realizing that you have to take an active role in your
life, but ultimately they do need to be creating an active arc through their story. Now, the reason why
we're looking at this now, the reason why I think about it now is because if I build my characters to be
active from the very beginning, if I'm already thinking about what the active version of the story is, it
makes me more frustration proof later.
If you have a passive character and she stays passive, that means that you're going to find yourself, as a
writer, continually having to throw things at her, bigger and badder things in order to keep the story
moving, in order to make it look like something is happening. I don't know if you've ever written a novel
like that, I have, but you start out with something amazing or strange or awful happening to the
character and then they explore that situation, then what are they going to do? You're stuck, you have
to think of something else to happen, and then something else to happen, something bigger to happen.
Then the aliens come down and they kill everyone. Yeah. So remember that hero shape is generally
active. Passive to active is fine, but still we're looking for active. Now, what does this look like in real
time?
When I was writing the Raven Boys, it is a multi point of view story. So this is oversimplified somewhat,
but one of the protagonists is Gansey. Gansey, if you haven't read the book, is the one who was going on
a quest to find a Welsh King. Now he has a friend named Noah and Noah is also involved in this quest,
but he's very much an observer. Now, don't get me wrong, Noah is very important. The story literally
wouldn't exist without Noah. However, if I was trying to write the events of the Raven cycle, from the
point of view of Noah using that camera, it would have been very difficult to keep it feeling as active as it
did with Gansey. Gansey is seeking, he's out there getting into trouble, for better or for worse. Noah is
the one who is watching from the sidelines, occasionally nudging, but still not being the active hero in
the story.
I would like to take a moment to talk about a growing medical problem that I see amongst main
characters in aspiring novels works. The medical problem is this ... Amnesia. Now I don't know if you've
ever written a novel featuring an amnesiac main character, nor do I know if you have ever actually met
an amnesiac in real life, but I have discovered in talking to many aspiring writers, that I have met far
more people in that first group, people who have written about amnesiacs and then people in the
second group, people who have known actual amnesiacs. You should know that I'm doing this entire
segment from a very nonjudgmental place because I, in my troubled youth, when I was scrawny,
unfriendly, and a writer, also wrote my share of amnesiacs. I wrote about enchanters with amnesia. I
wrote about historical figures with amnesia. I wrote about unicorns with amnesia.
What is it about amnesia? I think part of it is that it's difficult to exposit. It's difficult to fill in backstory.
It's like that a metaphor about holding the bundle of balloons and some of them get away. Backstory
and knowing when to actually patter in a previous life, that's second level stuff, that's one of those blue
balloons that it can just get out there into the sky. If your character is an amnesiac, well, you don't have
to worry about figuring out how to describe their past because they have none. It also keeps you from
having to balance things like interpersonal relationships and family members, jobs, stuff like that,
because guess what? They're a paper doll. You can just move them through the story. That is the reason
why I'm talking about these amnesiac characters here in this section, passive and active stories, because
the problem with amnesiac characters is that generally they are passive.
By their very construction, they're waiting to be just unleashed upon the world where they spend an
extremely large period of their time trying to figure out who they are, instead of actually just leaping
directly into the bigger plot. So when you find yourself reaching for an amnesiac character, try and
remember ... That's an amnesia joke. That it's not the most active choice. While we're on the topic of
passive versus active tension, I want to take a moment to talk about two different kinds of plot lines that
I think that you can put into a novel. Now for want of a better term, I'm going to call them abstract and
concrete. Proper literary theory might actually have a name for them. I don't know. I just think of them
as abstract versus concrete, if I think of them in terms of names at all. Abstract, to me, is a plot line
that's ongoing, continuous, and often internal. Concrete goal is one that's external and has a definite
end point.
To me, I think that the crux of commercial fiction is that the concrete plot line is obvious. There might be
an abstract one as well, but there must be an overarching concrete one that proves the abstract one.
Confused? Let's have a chart. Alright, let's take a look here. On the left, we have our abstract plot lines.
Staying married, protecting a city from aliens, not being anxious, staying friends. On the right, concrete,
falling in love, killing the enemy's queen, learning to speak to strangers, and finding Glendower. Let's
look at that very first thing on the concrete list, falling in love. One of the most commercial shapes that
you can possibly hope to write is that of a romance. There's no reason why we should be surprised that
romance is actually the best selling genre in America. I think 50% of all novels that are sold are
romances.
It is an incredibly satisfying and easy shape. We know what we're looking for, we're looking for when the
couple falls in love and stays in love. Now on the other hand, take a look at the more abstract plot line of
a struggling couple, trying to stay married. Imagine the shape of it. They fight, they make up, they fight,
they make up, they fight, they make up. Now you can't just end the book when they make up, because
how does the reader know that this making up is any different than the others? This abstract plot line is
continuous and ongoing. It's like staying friends. How do you know that they're successfully going to stay
friends from now on? There's no end point. So what you need to do, if you're telling an abstract story
like this, and you're totally allowed to, in fact it's one of the things that's most satisfying, I think, to
writers is these more nebulous plot lines.
The thing about these abstract plot lines is that you must impose a concrete plot over the top of them to
prove that they've actually accomplished it, to give the reader something to hang on to. Attach that
conflict of staying married to a real concrete thing that they were fighting over. Perhaps they were
fighting over how she wants to renovate the kitchen and he wants to renovate the bath. It sounds like a
terrible couple. At the end of the book, you can tell that they've actually solved their conflicts because
they have renovated their kitchen into a giant kitchen bathroom, compromise. That's a house I'd like to
visit. What about a story protecting a city from invading innumerable aliens. Not saying that ever
happens in a [inaudible 00:10:28] novel, but it could. Yeah so if they're throwing themselves at the city
in various waves, how do we know that they've actually been able to complete the aliens?
How many aliens do you have to get rid of before you're safe again? This is why so many stories of aliens
impose them with a hive mind because that way the viewer or reader understands that if the queen is
killed, the story is satisfyingly over. Imposing that concrete rule on top of an ongoing abstract plot line,
lets your reader feel satisfaction. They can look forward to a real concrete act and that's important for
feeling like they are experiencing beginning, middle, and end. Now, how does this play out in a
[inaudible 00:11:06] coming of age story? Let's look at this one, which is about learning to be less
anxious. How will we know if this character has succeeded becoming less anxious? It's an internal
journey after all, but like the story of the squabbling couple, we have to impose a concrete storyline
over the top so that we can see a physical proof of her internal change.
So for instance, if she begins the story being dressed down by a bully of a teacher, what we need to do is
finish the book by proving our point. She obliterates this teacher in a debate in front of the entire
school. We have now seen a concrete proof and goal of this quiet internal abstract plot line. Now as
authors, it is okay to be more interested in the abstract line than the concrete plot line, but it requires
you learning that readers want the concrete, they need to have grounding. So I might be the most
interested in telling a story about the characters in the Raven Boys, staying friends, but I need more than
that to propel the reader through the story so they understand when the story ends. That means the
Glendower and caves water plot line gets imposed over the top allowing me to tell the abstract story,
that's really important to me.
Now, commercial fiction doesn't always get tied up with a neat little bow, but you can be sure there's
pretty much always a bow of some type at the end. Alright, let's talk about where your story begins. This
is a terrible question to contemplate by the way, where should my story begin within my plot? This
question is basically that mirror from Harry Potter, the one that shows you your deepest wishes or
whatever it is, Harry stares into it for days upon days until eventually Dumbledore finds him and is like,
"No man, don't do it. It'll drive you around the twist. Come on, come back to the light." Yeah trying to
ask yourself, where is the perfect place for my story to begin? It's that mirror and in real life, there is no
Dumbledore to come along and say, "No man, no man. Moth. Flame. Walk away."
So I'm going to tell you that, first of all, you're going to have to make the decision eventually. Second of
all, like so many things in brainstorming, there is no perfect or right or wrong answer. The best
beginning for your plot line is one that allows you, again, to look at the parts of your premise and your
story that you're interested in looking at. Now, there's some more concrete, nitty gritty things that are
important for actual starting it structure-wise, which we're going to talk about in structure. For instance,
yes, you want to start your story at a point of change and you want to start at a point that's exciting, but
that's not actually what I'm trying to decide at this point in my brainstorming flow chart. What I'm trying
to do is just narrow down my timeframe, figure out a general ballpark of when in this idea, my plot is
taking place.
Now I want to play a game with that idea that I gave you so that we can see how starting the story in
different places will give us dramatically different novels. So the idea, again, everyone, 24 disappears for
24 hours. Now there's two immediate obvious choices for where to start. The first one is, make them all
disappear. That's the beginning, your story opens and everyone has just gone. Then the other obvious
option is make the story begin when they've all come back. Now think about how this changes, what the
story is about. If you begin the story, when they've all just disappeared, it has become a mystery. It's
become a puzzle. Where did they go? What do they have in common? Who did it to them? Are we going
to get them back? On the other hand, if you start the story when they come back, you instead ask
questions like what happened to them out there? Is it going to happen again? How did this experience
change them? Those are two wildly different novels.
Now let's think about some less obvious starts. Instead of starting it right when they disappear, ask
yourself how it changes the story if you instead have the novel begin 24 years after they disappeared.
The conditions are the same as when the first batch of 24 year olds disappeared and now everyone is
waiting to find out if it happens again. Or even go more intimate, maybe start the story a couple of
weeks before they disappear, follow a 24 year old, your protagonist, who is running away from their life.
They desperately want to disappear and then are dragged back to their life against their best wishes.
Then magically at the end of your first act, they're going to disappear along with everyone else and you
get to explore what it's like to run from your life on purpose versus being snatched from your life.
These are all very different novels, and like I said, there's not right, there's not wrong, there's just the
one that lets you look at the story in the way that's most exciting to you. So take this moment now to
practice that exercise of going through this idea, the one that was given to you, every 24 year old
disappears for 24 hours and then do the exact same thing with your plot idea. What happens if you start
at five years later, five days later, what happens if you start at five days before? Five years before? See
how it changes your story.
VIDEO 8:
When I was a young history major, there was one course that everyone had to take before they
graduated: History 299: An Introduction to History. An innocuous name, in no way did it suggest what it
truly was: A thing of rumor and dread amongst students that was referred to very rarely by its proper
name and more often in a hateful whisper, "HIST 299."
It was known as a grade breaker and a soul crusher. It was not actually about studying history, or rather,
it was only about studying history. You didn't learn a single thing about the past in it. Instead, it was all
about the methods, the tips, and tricks to taking on data and disseminating it to others, conveying
history as a history student. In many ways, it's not unlike what you guys are doing to yourself right now
willingly. Anyway, it was dreaded.
I took a section. The only section that was open was from a professor who was also infamous. She had
an office full of cats, well, cat-printed paraphernalia. I really found out too late in a semester that the
way to her heart was to bring her another piece of paraphernalia with cat on it. It was like an offering to
a great goddess. If only I'd worked it out earlier in the semester. Anyway, the point was HIST 299, I
actually learned more there than in the entire rest of my semester because I could pick up history
anywhere, but learning how to actually present it, well, that actually turned out to be invaluable. Sorry,
HIST 299.
I'm telling you this long story about the dreaded HIST 299 because one of the things that we were taught
to do in this course was to give presentations and one of the things they told us to do when presenting
was to use this technique: "Hello. Today, I'm going to speak about A, B, and C," and then you were
supposed to speak about A and then B and then C and then you were supposed to say, "In conclusion,
now that I've talked to you about A, B, and C, blank."
I thought when I heard this, "What a ridiculous piece of advice. How canned. Nobody wants to hear that.
It's going to be so boring." It actually turned out to be amazing advice. Those of you who have had to sit
to listen to a speaker who doesn't know where they're headed know exactly why this is great advice.
You remember those moments when you sit in a school assembly and a guest speaker comes on and
they start out strong and then they begin to flag, they're slowly petering off? You're rooting for them,
they're starting to "Um" and "Um" or you can tell they really know where they're going to go, the crowd
is getting restless: "Come on, you can do it. You can do it." Those talks go on forever.
Now, contrast that with a speaker who really knows what they're going to say, who tells you what
they're going to say, and then does exactly what they promised. That gives you that sense of confidence
and also, you can mark where you are in the talk based upon where they've told you they are in the talk:
"I'm going to talk about A, B, and C." Well, if you're on B, you know you only have to make it through C
and then it's over. It's strangely comforting and it makes a longer talk seem shorter.
We want to know that the people delivering media to us know what they're doing. As a reader, it's our
job to appear confident, to appear like we know the story that we're telling. Readers don't need to know
what you're going to give them, but it gives them incredible confidence when they suspect that you
know what you're going to give them. They want to know that it's planned. They want to know that
there's a greater picture.
I'm telling you all of this because the section that we're working on now is about three-act structure.
Three-act structure. Now, I talk a little bit about three-act structure at the beginning of this seminar and
honestly, I could talk about it for much longer than I'm about to talk about it, because you could teach
entire classes on three-act structure and in fact, I'm sure that many people have, but really, I'm just
focusing on it for long enough to think about the development of my idea.
Really, what I'm thinking about is how three-act structure is the most commercial shape for a novel. It's
the most commercial shape, because the most commercial shape for a story, as you'll recall, is this:
beginning, middle, end. Three-act structure perfectly sets you up for that.
Now, it can be tempting to think, "Eh. Three-act structure sounds a little bit predictable, right?" But
yeah, it is predictable. It's predictable in the same way that HIST 299 taught me. It's predictable in the
same way as I'm going to talk about "A, B, and C," talking about A, B, and C, and then saying, "I've talked
about A, B, and C." It's comforting because you know where in the story you are, which means you can
anticipate the rise and fall of tension. It's invisible. You don't need to break this invisible default
structure unless you absolutely need to. The more complex your content is, the less likely you're going
to want to spend the reader's attention on breaking the structure.
Think about it this way: This seminar is full of extremely complicated information, right? Imagine I was
singing it to you, I was doing it in slam poetry, I'm breaking the rules of grammar to convey it to you. It's
going to make it even more complicated and difficult and at some point of hour three of me rapping
what you're supposed to do with story structure, you would say, "I'm just going to buy the book. I'm
going to read it. It's fine. This is too hard." You don't want people to do that with your novel, so don't
break three-act structure unless you absolutely need to break three-act structure.
All right, there's shorthand for what three-act structure looks like that floats around there on the
Internet. You might have it already. It's this: Act one: Get the character up a tree. Act two: Throw stones
at him. Act three: Get him down gracefully, having learned something about the process of having
stones thrown at him.
It doesn't work badly as a sort of introduction to what three-act structure is supposed to do. Act one is
generally about establishing normal and then you break normal, so in this case, the character is
presumably living their normal life and then they somehow climb or flee up a tree.
Act two is about escalating tensions. Fun and games is the name of second act in many film-writing
classes. In our act two, then this character who has now fled up a tree is having stones thrown at him for
some strange reason. What kind of place does this guy live at where he's in a tree and people begin to
throw stones at him? Anyway.
Then act three is supposed to be about change: The character has learned something from the process
of act one and act two, is inextricably changed from the person they were in act one by the process of
having stones thrown at them while in a tree, which honestly does seem like a good way to change your
outlook on life. Then in act three, you resolve that and show that change.
I mean, it seems to work right? When you look at it on the surface, it applies to many, many stories,
right? Look at The Hunger Games, for instance: You can assume that the games themselves are the tree
that they climb and the battle is then the stones being thrown at them, literally stones, tracker jackers,
as it were. Or look at Coraline: The Mirror World is the tree, possibly, or even The Scorpio Races, where
you think, "Well, maybe the race training is the tree." It sort of works, it kind of works.
Really, where it falls apart is remember when I told you what story was, when I said it was about conflict
or change or exploration? If you use the shorthand that I just described to remember what the acts
actually are supposed to do, it weights it towards conflict rather than exploration. It starts to fall apart
when you look at stories where the middle act is more about exploration, wonder, or joy, which if you're
reading fantasy, which I assume you are, if you're watching this seminar, a lot of fantasy is about wonder
and awe and exploration.
Look at stories like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Yes, they go through the wardrobe into
Narnia and bad things do happen there, but for the longest time in the second act, it's actually about
exploration. The stones don't appear until quite far in. They're promised early, but they don't show up
until later.
Or maybe The Italian Job, if you've seen that movie. It's got cars in it, so of course I've seen it. It's a heist
movie where they're stealing gold using MINI Coopers, a very practical solution. Everything in that movie
goes right, actually. After the first acts gets us going onto the heist, in the second act, they make a plan,
they execute the plan, they make a plan, they execute the plan. The whole fun of that movie is that it
keeps on working until the darkest moment at the end of that act, but there is no tree really. There's no
stones until the very end of it. The second act is all joy because of the genre.
Then think about The Raven Boys, where I guess the tree would be Cabeswater, but so much of the
second act of Raven Boys is about exploration instead.
Now, call me a daydreamer, call me an optimist, call me a lover of magic, but one of the reasons why I'm
drawn to fantasy as a genre is that I love that sense of exploration. I love showing readers another
world. I love the sense that you can look around the corner and see something that's absolutely
amazing, that doesn't exist in our world.
But I find that this balance between conflict and exploration is often very much age-dependent, that
you're more likely to find books that focus on exploration for younger ages. I think that's one of the
reasons why fantasy readers often cling to and loved their old middle-grade fantasies. It's not so much
that they're regressive, that they love that the main characters are kids, but they have a sense of
wonder that often gets lost in adult fiction.
I mean, think about it: In a picture book or a middle-grade book, a birthday, if that's your conflict, your
tension, it can be set up as what's in the birthday package. That's a good enough tension. You can go
and draw out, "Oh, it's a strange-shaped package. It might be something amazing or might be something
poor. I hope it's something amazing." That's good enough, hope for tension.
By the time you get to young adults and you put a birthday into it, instead of being the positive tension
of, "Oh, what am I going to get for my birthday?" it's something like, "Oh, it's my birthday and I've been
conscripted to fight in a war of all of the teens of the world being pitted against each other."
Then by the time you get to adults and you put a birthday in it as some kind of tension, it's more like,
"Oh, it's my kid's birthday, but I missed it because I'm hanging out with my mistress and birthdays are
futile anyway. What is life?"
Okay, that's a gross oversimplification, but the point is, remember that you can bring in exploration and
wonder at any age for any book genre and it will lift up your book's middle act.
All right, speaking of genre and story expectations, I want to take a brief moment to talk about the
amount of story because the amount of story that you're going to need to brainstorm for your upcoming
novel is very genre-dependent. Think about this as you're toying around different avenues that you can
follow in your plot. Think about the amount of story in something like Sleepless in Seattle versus Game
of Thrones. Think about how if you're writing something that is light, a light young adult romance, that
you're going to need fewer plot points than you are if you are writing a planned three-book trilogy that
sweeps across the world.
If you're more interested in the small character moments, start asking yourself, "Am I really interested in
writing a trilogy or am I actually thinking of that book in my head, is it actually a single volume? Is it a
different genre than I was picturing?" Or adjust how much story it is that you're thinking about.
Likewise, if you have all of these twists and turns and billions of characters and your goal was to write a
light young adult romance, ask yourself, "All right, wait a second. Which of these things is wrong?
There's a mismatch. The story in my head that I'm intending to write, was it this light romance with its
pretty clean plot, few plot points, or am I actually more into this twisty, turny thing? Because I need to
adjust between those two things." We'll talk about that more when we get to the actual planning of
writing things on the page, but it's worth thinking about now as you're swirling things around in your
head.
All right, now it is time to take another journey to Write What You Know Land. "Wow, Maggie. You sure
do bring up that advice a lot, considering that you said that you didn't like it very much." Yeah, that's
true. I'll probably talk it out in therapy. The thing is: "Write what you know" applies here, too, kind of,
sort of. "Write what you know" means that the easiest story shape to tell is one that's true. It's one that
you've experienced.
Now, I want to take a moment to say remember the distinction between personal and autobiographical.
That's true here more than ever. If you are writing about a problem that you're still grappling with
yourself, I'll give you a secret: If you haven't worked out the solution to that problem, your character's
not going to either. If it does, it's going to take a very long time because you know who's changing? Not
just your character, but you. Now, that said, if you move autobiographical away and instead pick up
personal, if you take a story that's happened to you or that you've observed that has some distance to it,
that shape can present itself quite easily.
I'll give you an example: All the Crooked Saints, the story there is true. For those of you who haven't
read it, I'll try and describe it. I understand it's a very difficult novel to describe. All of my novels are
somewhat difficult to describe. I know they say that a good commercial novel is supposed to have a
great elevator pitch: You're supposed to be able to get into an elevator and then very quickly describe
what it's about before you get to the next floor, but really, the truth of my novels is that they're so
complicated that I've run entire contests online where the only thing you had to do to enter it was try to
describe one of my novels. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Right, All the Crooked Saints: It takes place in the 1960s out in Colorado and it's centered around a
family that can perform an unusual miracle. Actually, there's two kinds of miracles that happen here in
this little compound. The first miracle is performed by the family. The family are all saints of a sort and
the family is this: They can make your inner darkness visible, tangible, concrete.
For instance, one of the pilgrims arrives and he is a radio DJ who feels like he is always being watched
and fame is weighing heavily on his shoulders. He arrives there, asks for a miracle, and when they grant
it to him, his inner darkness is manifested and he becomes a giant, so it's unavoidable. People have to
see him everywhere. It's his worst fear basically made concrete.
Obviously, pilgrims, once they had their inner darkness manifested can't leave the place and rejoin the
real world, so the other miracle that has to happen there is that they banish their inner darkness. This is
something that the pilgrims have to do themselves.
Now, there's a taboo that is put upon the family, upon the saints, which is that if they help the pilgrims
solve their problem and achieve the second miracle, then the saints' own inner darkness will come down
upon themselves. So it is said, a saint's inner darkness is worse than an ordinary person's.
At the beginning of this story, the saints have distanced themselves from the pilgrims. The pilgrims
arrive, ask for the first miracle, which they grant, and then the saints are completely hands-off and they
push them out to figure out their problems on their own. This has turned out to be disastrous and yeah,
none of the pilgrims are solving any of their problems. They're getting a backlog of pilgrims there and
eventually, they have to come to grips with this whole concept.
Now, the reason why I say this story is true is because it's based very loosely on something I lived
through a couple of years before this was written. People used to come to me, no, they still do all the
time for advice. Readers would come to me and I would give them advice, hashtag it "dubious life
advice" and off they would go.
Friends would also do it, family would also do it. They would come to me and they would say, "Maggie,
I'm having this problem and I know that you are really good listener, so can you tell me what to do?" I
would listen and then I would say, "Oh, yes. Okay, awesome. I'm so glad you came to me because you
are right. This is a problem that you once did in the past before and you told me before that if I ever saw
you doing this, I should stop you to keep you from making the same mistake. I'm here to tell you now
you're doing the thing, so stop." Then to my shock and surprise, the friend would go off and do the
mistake, anyway: "What are you doing? You asked me for advice. What? Are you blowing me off?"
Then sometimes friends would come to me and say, "I'm having this problem. Help me out. What should
I do?" I would say, "I'm so glad that you came to me because years ago, you told me about how your
parents did this very same thing and you said you were so glad that you weren't repeating the mistakes
of your parents. I'm here to tell you right now as your unbiased mirror, you are. You're totally falling into
the trap that was set for you. Escape your bounds." Then they would go and make the mistake anyway
and then trundle into darkness.
I was so frustrated with this. Sometimes, I would follow the friend into the darkness and try and pull
them back out again. Really, what I was trying to decide through this whole time period of my life was:
What is my responsibility as the person who is giving advice? Because the thing is, sometimes it's easy to
give advice and then just step back and say, "You know what? I wash my hands of it. It's your job to do
something with it."
Other times, though, it's someone that you know well or it's a problem that you went through yourself,
it's very personal, and when people come to you for advice, the temptation then is to do the follow-up,
right, after-care, make sure that they actually follow through, they're supported, et cetera, et cetera,
though sometimes that means that they're going into a dark place where you've been before, following
them down means going back into that dark place yourself. Is that what you're required to do as a good
advice giver? Or do you keep yourself apart, clear? Is it just about going and saying, "This is what I
recommend," and walking away?
All the Crooked Saints is basically what I decided about what my responsibility was as someone who was
able to give advice, who was being asked for advice, and this idea that your own inner darkness would
come upon you if you jumped into the fray, basically, because I had already decided before I began
writing this novel, that really, if I could be pulled back down into the darkness, it was my job as a strong
person to indeed be forced to face my demons again. Because I'd already decided that, it meant I
already knew how the story was going to go. I knew that eventually I believe that the saints were going
to learn that if they were so weak that they were able to be pulled back into their darkness again, they
needed to, that support was better than retreating.
That meant that I had my three-act structure already. I could just sit down there and fill it in with all of
my details. That's what I mean by the easiest story shape is one that's true, but you can also see how if I
was still in it, if I was still trying to decide if I was supposed to throw myself in after the fray, if I still
wanted to look in the mirror at myself, if I thought the community was worth the danger of diving back
into a fraught topic, well, I would have never gotten to the end of that book. Write what you know, but
write what you've already figured out.
VIDEO 9:
Okay guys, how are we feeling? Be honest. Good? Excited? Ready to write? Overwhelmed? Lost?
Discouraged? Are any of you crying? If you're crying, you can take a moment to go to the bathroom and
clean up your face and get a drink of water. Actually, maybe all of you guys should get a drink of water
now because it's been awhile and hydration is important. I will wait.
Honestly, it is fine for you guys to be feeling any of those feelings at this point. It's fine for you guys to be
feeling all of those feelings at this point. I think it's important to remind you, first of all, of that thing I
said way back at the beginning of the seminar. Remember, this seminar is not about teaching you how
to write. It's teaching you how I write, which means that this process at this point might not feel like it's
anything that you can adopt, which is fine. Or it might feel like something that you need to work on
quite a bit in order to make it useful to you. Also fine. Or it might be feeling like it's exactly the process
you've always been waiting for. And it's still incredibly overwhelming because what I'm asking you to do
is to think about an entire novel before you write the novel down. I might need to cry and get a glass of
water. I don't know.
Anyway, the other thing is that it's overwhelming because it is a lot of novel to think about. My entire
process involves me thinking about the novel for as long as possible before I ever write anything onto
paper. It means I basically make so many decisions in my head that I push myself to the breaking point. I
can no longer remember everything that I need to remember. And I've got to get a piece of paper and
write something down. And at this stage in the flow chart, after going through again, mood, idea,
premise, setting, story. Story is basically where I start to get a little bit broken. I'm thinking, I really want
to start writing now. I've got enough ideas. It's good. I'll work it out on paper. No. No. I still need to think
about it more before I actually dive into the manuscript.
We're going to move on to the next item in our flow chart. It's a big one. You should know that about a
year ago an aspiring writer came to me and she asked for some advice. She said that she thought she
was pretty well aware of what her strengths were as a writer. She said that she thought that she was
good at drawing characters. She was good at dialogue and she could craft a nice sentence. But she said,
her real problem came in with making things happen. Plot, story. Did I have any advice for her? It was
like looking in a mirror. I got to tell you. No, that's exactly true. Here's the thing. I consider myself a
character driven writer, which is why it might surprise you that only after eight other videos, we are now
headed to the next item on the flow chart, which is this, character.
But it is precisely because I think that character is the thing that interests me the most and character is
the thing that I think I'm probably best at, that I have to save it for way far down in the process. If I begin
with a character, I already know what will happen now. I know because I've done it before. I will draw a
rich and interesting and three dimensional character, full of backstories and side stories, a massive
individual. And they will become so complex that it will be impossible to plug them into any story that I
come up with afterwards. Or even worse, I'll just get bored of it. I'll have done the fun part already. I've
eaten the frosting so what is the point of even baking the cake? I just had the aliens come down and I
never even did a single stitch of prose. For me, character has to come last otherwise I won't spend the
work on everything else. It's got to be the reward. Also, as we'll see, character actually works better for
me after I do all of the other work first. Let's check out why.
Let's start off our hour of talking about characters with three truths about characters. Here's number
one, character is subtractive. I know a lot of people would say that the best thing a character could be is
realistic, but I think I have to disagree. A character should be realistic, I think, but a character is realistic
in the same way that art is realistic. That a person in a painting matches the tone of whatever the style
of painting is. Imagine the difference between a photograph and a painting. And I don't mean an artistic
photograph. I mean a cellphone photo. I mean a totally random cellphone photo. I mean the phone is
pointed towards a crowd of people in front of a national monument on a sunny day. Tap the screen,
done. No framing or anything done.
When you see that photograph, yes, you're going to see everything because everything will be in equal
detail. The colors will be exactly as they were in real life and there's no priority. We don't know where to
look. It's just, it's there. It's reality. But that's not what we really want to see in a character. Instead,
imagine what a painted version or a composed shot of that picture would do instead. What it would do
is it would arrange that crowd to tell us where our eye should look. It would remove people or move
people or change who's in focus or not so that our eyes are led agreeably to whatever the artist would
like us to be looking at. A pair of young lovers, a pair of young fighters or perhaps pushing away the
crowd entirely and leading us through the people so that we're looking at the monument behind it.
Likewise, the artist will tell us how to feel about the scene by removing some of the colors, using a
limited palette and instead injecting the painting with mood. We're not just looking at reality, we're
looking at an interpretation of reality and that's what we really want in a story. That's why we're reading
fiction. It's comforting to know that someone has shaved off the edges and made it into something
that's art. That's on purpose. We want meaning in our stories, we don't need to be a great deep
meaning, but we want to see the interpretation. That's what makes it feel like a story. Now that amount
of interpretation is definitely up to the genre and the kind of the story. But definitely subtractive. And
that's what character is. Characters are great art.
All right, truth number two. Character is subservient. Now I just said that I wouldn't let myself deal with
character until I'd done everything else, because otherwise I wouldn't give anything else any weight.
And that is true, but it's also true as I hinted that character is better if you think about it after doing
everything else. In the long run, character will have to be subservient to everything else. Allow me to
demonstrate. Imagine the character, Loki, everyone knows a version of Loki. I don't know which version
of Loki appears in your head when I say the word Loki, I have a car named Loki. It's a 1973 Camaro. I put
it into the Raven Cycle. I've had it for many, many years now. And I have to say that at the time, this was
long before Tom Hiddleston's hot Loki had ever really appeared on the scene. At the time, I just really
liked the concept of Loki, the god of mischief and chaos and anarchy. Now I'm having second thoughts
about naming an unreliable muscle car, Loki. I have to tell you, it's lived up to its name, maybe one too
many times.
Anyway, Loki. All right. We all have a vision of Loki. We all know a version of him. Maybe, you know Loki
from the Marvel movies or perhaps, you know Loki from Diana Wynne Jones' Eight Days of Luke, or
perhaps, you know one of the more traditional old Norse versions of Loki even. But still his traits remain
mostly the same. He's a trickster god. He's a mischief maker. He's an agent of chaos. He's a fun character
to write and think about, but he changes depending on what kind of book you put him in because he is
as all good characters are, subservient to mood.
Now it's important to note, it's not subservient to story. The Marvel Loki is going to remain the same
Loki no matter what the plot is. Yes, he'll change through it, but generally speaking, he's still going to be
recognizable as that Loki and the way it's expressed. However, I want you to imagine a Loki character
put into a Wuthering Heights sort of book, a gothic romance. Imagine a Loki character that is put into
Hunger Games. Imagine a Loki character put into Remains of the Day. All of these versions of Loki will
have to obey the mood of the book. And that means the way that each of those character traits of
mischief and anarchy will be limited, constrained and colored tinted like that photograph according to
the mood that you have set them in.
Yeah, imagine the difference between a Loki that's placed into, I don't know, Harry Potter versus the
Loki character that is put into Fight Club, Brad Pitt's character, they're just expressed in different ways.
This can be a somewhat knotty concept. Let me and I'm being knotty with a K-N not naughty like a, so let
me put this into a greater context. Let me give you an example. In The Wolves of Mercy Falls, there's a
character named Cole St. Clair. He appears in the second book. I really like writing him. He's a ton of fun.
He's actually a bit of a Loki character, to tell you the truth. He's a bit of an agent of chaos. He's a failed
rockstar. Well, a successful rockstar, failed human, a drug addict who then comes to Mercy Falls and
becomes a werewolf.
Now, as I mentioned before, back in the mood section, the mood of Shiver and the following two books
in the trilogy is bittersweet. It's soft focus. It's dreamy. Now it's difficult to take a sharp edged drug
addict, and realistically with all of their flaws, place them into a series like that and maintain the mood.
What did I do? I'm not going to take away the hard edges of him. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to write them in such a way that it is subservient to mood. While he is an addict in Linger, all of his
addiction and hard edges and drug use are instead expressed in the metaphor of werewolfing.
Whenever it gets too dark, always I go and grab a metaphor. It's the truth, but it's a stylized, bittersweet,
soft focus version of the truth.
Now, fast forward. After the trilogy is done a few years later, I came out with the book Sinner. Sinner is a
standalone that follows Cole St. Clair and Isabel Culpeper, two very sharp and jagged characters in Los
Angeles. It was a standalone. It didn't have to match the mood of trilogy. And what I wanted was to
write a novel that had the same mood that Los Angeles has to me, beautiful and sharp and glittering and
unforgiving under that unwinking sun. It meant that in Sinner, Cole could be more of himself without
stylizing those edges. There's much more of the unflinching look of his addiction and much less of the
werewolf thing in Sinner, because I didn't need the werewolf thing. I actually needed the addiction on
page so that I could confirm my mood that I'd already decided for Sinner. Same character to different
moods. Character is subservient to mood.
Character is complex. I said before that at this point in the flow chart, I'm starting to feel pretty
overwhelmed. It's hard for me to carry it in my head. By the time I get to story, I'm already at the tipping
point and character is pushing me over the edge because character is complicated. Running through all
of these permutations in my head gets increasingly difficult. I start asking myself questions like, well,
what if she has siblings? How many siblings? Did I decide if the parents were dead? Are they separated?
Does this character have type I diabetes? How does it change it if they're enemies before the story
begins? All of these permutations build and build and build and build until eventually I usually can't take
it at this point. I need to write something down. Now I do not start writing the novel, but what I do is I
start jotting little notes to myself so I can start keeping track of the things that I like the best. For
example, here are some old notes from the Raven Cycle.
Honestly, this is when it's starting to get exciting for me. Overwhelming and exciting because hopefully if
I've done my job right at this point, I not only have managed to keep that passion and id and excitement
alive of that original idea, but I've answered enough of the questions that I have even more questions
that I can't wait to explore on the paper. That is the entire goal of the strategy of getting things out of
my head.
I'm going to tell you the same thing about character that I told you about setting. Character is a choice.
Your main character is a choice. Setting is a choice. Don't let yourself default to the easy version, to the
easy camera, to the obvious set of eyes on the scene, the person most like you, or the character type
that you prefer to read about. Instead, ask yourself, why am I putting this character in the driver's seat?
Is this the character that allows me to actually look at the premise in the way that I want to? And we're
going to talk more about that now, but before we do, I want to end this video with a statement which is
cringy, but needs to be said to all of us. And it's this, a main character is a choice and that main character
shouldn't be you. There's some notable exceptions, of course. But generally speaking, the character
should not be you. It shouldn't be you in any way whatsoever.
The problem with this is that that's the first thing we often reach for. And we don't do it on purpose. I
told you I was a full time portrait artist before I was an author. And as a budding artist, I would try and
draw people's faces. And it's fascinating to look back at them now and see that all of my early work,
everybody's face is actually the same face. I thought that I was drawing someone else's face, especially
because I would often be copying from magazines or something. But no, they're just the same face,
especially their eyes. Their eyes are all the same eyes. Nose is also pretty similar. Guess whose eyes and
nose they all had? Yeah, it was my face. Yeah, I wasn't doing it on purpose. The problem was the mirror.
Blame it on the mirror.
For my entire life, that's what I had seen most often. If I studied any face with any length of time
whatsoever, what I looked at was my face so an eye looked like my eye. Unless I was observing things
carefully and making a concerted effort to not draw my eye, that was what I did. Was eye shape, I drew
what I knew instead of what I saw. And we do the same thing when we write characters, we don't know
what about our own experience is exclusive. And so we accidentally write it into books. What's a
particularly cringy example? Well, I think we've all kind of experienced it. Have you ever read a novel for
a friend and you've had that uncomfortable feeling that the friend is writing themselves into a novel that
you have just learned something about them and their preferences that you really wish that you hadn't?
What gave you that inkling? It's usually because it's something that's unusual, but because it's not
signaled in the text as unusual. You realize, oh, they think that's normal.
For instance, I remember that at one point in my writing career, it was after I was published, I thought to
myself, Maggie, you've got to start writing characters who are not musicians. There are people in this
world who are not musicians. And I thought, how am I going to do that? It seems impossible to me to
imagine it now, but I very distinctly remember having this thought conversation with myself. Who are
you if you're not a musician?" I asked myself. Because everyone I knew was a musician. I was a musician.
And so it was so difficult to imagine not having an instrument in your hand, which seems insane. And yet
there it was. I just, I was young. I had no idea of how to step outside that exclusivity of my experience.
What else? We were tea drinkers in our house. I never put any coffee in my books whatsoever. It didn't
occur to me. I would just put tea in. Didn't matter who you were, you could be a rugged, manly
American man in my political thrillers and you'd be sipping on tea and listening to counter reformation
masses, because why not? That's what I listen to. Is that strange? Is it strange? It's strange. It's fine for
your characters to do some of the things that you do. For instance, I play the bagpipes. Those of you
with clever eyes might notice that one of my characters plays the bagpipes, but it's an unusual thing.
And I need to know that it's an unusual thing. The book must contextualize the odd things otherwise the
characters will be you. Much of writing ourself is learning to write someone else.
For me, what really did it was I had to consciously make a portrait of someone else and put them into
my books. That changed the way I looked at characters forever and also broke me of just writing myself
by accident into them. There's an old version of the Raven Cycle that I wrote when I was 19. It doesn't
look a whole lot like it did now, but it had a whole bunch of characters in it. They were all me. There was
scholar me, angry me, dead me, but they were all me. They all did things that was consistent for their
character. The non angry one would never be angry for instance. And the angry one would never be
scholarly, et cetera, et cetera. But they still acted out those behaviors in the context of me, especially
because there's that piece of advice that writers often get, which is what would you do in this situation?
Don't answer that. Don't answer that. You know who would do the thing in the situation? You. Do you
know who you're writing then? You. A great example of this is, I was writing Shiver and there is a scene
where Grace, the protagonist, one of the co-protagonists, opens the door and there is a naked man
bleeding on her front doorstep. And her first action in the book is to get a towel to throw over his parts.
And I remember I sent that manuscript in and my editor said, "Do you think she would scream?" And I
said, "I beg your pardon?" He said, "Yeah. Do you think she would scream in this chapter?" And I looked
at the chapter and I said, "Where in the chapter would she scream?" He said, "When she opened the
door and she saw the body there." And I replied, "What good would screaming do her at that point? It
would just freak the guy out. Why would you open the door and scream at a guy?"
And he's like, "No, no, she would just open the door and she would scream. She wouldn't think about it.
She would just be scared and she would scream." "Do people do that?" He's like, "I would scream." "Oh.
Oh, great. Sure. Okay. I'll think about it." In the end, Grace, doesn't scream, I don't think. It's not the kind
of thing Grace would do, but also it was still the wrong choice when I wrote it because the reason why
she didn't scream wasn't because Grace wouldn't scream, it was because it didn't occur to me to scream
because I'm not a screamer. That's just an example of how well into my career, I still was having a hard
time stepping outside of my own experience to understand what other people would do.
This is a thing that we have to battle forever. In many ways, becoming a great writer, writing great
characters is about becoming a great observer. Learning all of the ways that your experience was
exclusive. And we're going to talk about the other nitty gritties in the next video.
VIDEO 10:
All right, let's talk again about choosing a camera for this project. At this point in the game, I'm getting
pretty close to putting words into a manuscript, so it's time to really focus on the humans in my book,
time to make the hard decisions. They're not going to make themselves.
So generally speaking, in a commercial project the stock engine on a three-act structure is an active
character. The easiest way to propel a reader through a story, after all, is with a character who is driving
the plot, rather than the other way around: a character who is seeking adventure, who has an active
goal.
Of course, this is not always true. There's no hard and fast rules in fiction, and we're going to talk about
less active characters at the end of this video, but generally speaking, you're never going to go wrong if
you start out trying to pick the most active player for your story.
So let's look at a couple of questions that we can ask ourselves to guide us to who might be the most
active person in our story. Who's in the thick of it? Who stands the most to gain? Who stands the most
to lose? Who started it? Who stopped it? Who offers an unusual view of a usual picture? Who offers a
mundane view of an unusual scenario? And finally, who lets you look at what you want to look at?
A good character does not have to answer all of these questions. It only has to answer one of these
questions. And at the end of the day, the most important one of those questions to answer is always
going to be the last one. Who lets you look at the part of the story that you want to look at?
Now, let's take a moment to go over these questions and imagine that we're interrogating the
characters in that idea we were talking about before. Everyone aged 24 disappeared for 24 hours. What
does that look like? Who is in the thick of it? This would probably be a character who either is the one
disappearing ,or maybe directly leading the charge of addressing where they went.
Who stands the most to gain? This goes back to that concept that we talked about in the previous video
of that character who possibly had originally run away from their lives before the start of everyone
disappearing. And this character might be looking at this as their chance to restart their life, to take over
again.
Who stands to lose the most? So what about a character who goes missing on the day of their best
friend's wedding? Or how about someone who misses a crucial court case or a final exam or a surgery?
Who started it? How do I feel about writing about the first person to vanish? How do I feel about writing
about the person or entity who engineered it? Is there a person who is making these 24-year-olds
disappear and are they 24 themselves? Because I got to say, now I'm intrigued.
Who stopped it? How are you ultimately planning on solving this problem? And how do you feel about
telling the story from the point of view of a person who brings the phenomenon to a close for good or
bad, an investigator, maybe.
Who offers an unusual view of a usual picture? For instance, if we're telling a novel in a mundane
situation that we think we already know everything about, like a typical office or a school, it changes the
story if we pick someone who offers a sort of intimate view of it. So what happens to the office if you
lose your 24-year-old FedEx guy who normally comes by every day, or what happens at the school, if you
lose a posse of 24-year-old grad students in an otherwise small and cliquish program?
Who offers a mundane view of an unusual scenario? Now, if we're talking about space stations, military
takeovers, a colony of centaurs fighting for survival, these are all very unusual scenarios, but you can
focus on someone with a mundane role to make an unusual setup more accessible.
Ultimately, who lets you look at what you want to look at? This is really the only hard and fast rule of
anything. You just have to sell it, convince the reader that your view is the one that is letting you tell a
story with confidence. And like that structure of, I'm going to talk about A, B and C, the reader will
follow along.
There's a book called Station Eleven, about the end of the world after a virus, and apocalyptic books can
be vast in scope. I mean, everything has been changed from the norm. So where do we point the
camera? You can point it as vast or as intimate as you like. In Station Eleven, the author points it at a
troop of traveling actors, which is a very interesting kind of view. It's intimate, it's small, but it lets her
look at what she obviously wants to look at, which is the role of culture and humanity, even in
heightened and disastrous times.
I want to tell you how I picked the cameras for my novel, The Scorpio Races, to demonstrate how you
can pick characters to look at what you want to look at in the story. Now, for those of you who haven't
read The Scorpio Races, get on it. No, I'm kidding. No, but seriously, those of you who haven't read it, it's
a retelling of an old legend about Celtic water horses. Now this legend is that a pretty simple one. It just
says that every November, these horses would come up out of the ocean, gallop up and down the shore.
If you caught one of them, they would be the best horse that you'd ever gotten. But if they caught you,
they would drag you back into the ocean, and later just your lungs and your liver would wash up. I read
it as a child. Always delighted me,
Right. So in The Scorpio Races, they race these horses. They come out every single fall, on this very small
island where the book takes place. They catch them, they train them, they ride them in this wild,
ferocious race for a high purse. Then the island goes back to its normal life.
Now the character I chose initially to tell this story was a girl named Puck Connolly. I picked her because
the world of The Scorpio Races, even though it took place in basically our world with a twist, was still a
fantasy world. It was full of strange rules that we, the reader, wouldn't have any idea of. The horses
operated in very complicated ways. The races would need to be explained. All of these things that were
different from our world, I had to find a way to convey to the reader in a way that didn't feel like a
chunk of exposition and instead just felt like they were getting it as truth so that they could feel an
emotional stake in the story.
So I thought Puck Connolly would be my main character. I decided that she would be someone who did
not ride in the races. She didn't participate in the races. Although it was a big culture on the island, it
wasn't the only thing. The real thing was that everyone knew that the water horses were dangerous.
And then they also knew that the races existed, but her family was apart from it. Before the book
begins, at some point, her parents are killed by water horses on a fishing boat. And so Puck's mentality
of being very anti the races and having fun with murder horses is already set in stone, and she's forced
into the races through choices beyond her control.
I thought she would be a good camera because since she doesn't know everything about the races, as
she explores this world and moves through it, everything she learns will be learned by the reader as
well, alongside her. It will feel very natural. And indeed, I wrote the first 10,000 words. I was having a
great time and it was working just as I wanted, but I discovered that I was only looking at half of the
island. I was only looking at half of the story I wanted to tell, because Puck had a very biased view of the
horses. She saw that they were awful and fearful and bloodthirsty, and didn't see the use of them at all.
They were just dangerous monsters. Which I did want. It was important to me to have that aspect of it.
But I also wanted to have the other side of the horses, what they represented: untamed nature,
unclassified spirituality, magic. Things that we have been unable to civilize. So I started looking at
different character options, and I eventually gave a point of view to another character named Sean
Kendrick. He was someone who was involved with the races. He had ridden in the races every single
year, ever since he was young, and his father had ridden in the races. But more than that, he was apart
from the rest of the island in that he held special knowledge about these horses. He was considered an
expert by the Islanders on the sort of arcane mystery of the horses. So he was in essence, the polar
opposite of Puck, a camera pointed in an entirely different direction at the exact same subject.
What was so great about making them so opposed ... and it was fun to push them as far as I could,
having similar worldviews, but expressing them entirely differently. What was fun about this was that it
made every single scene they were in together dynamic and crackle with tension. I didn't have to invent
it. They just thought of things differently. And so every single scene was just full of natural dynamic
tension. Also it allowed me to see everything I wanted to see on the island, to explore everything I
wanted to explore in that story. It was like having one eye before and suddenly having two. Binocular
vision meant that I was seeing the entire picture. That's the ideal number of characters for your story.
At the beginning of this video, I said that I thought the best character was generally the most active one.
And I do tend to think that's true, but there is a different kind of character that can be effective. They're
not really a passive character, but they're not the most active choice. They're often a surprising choice, a
choice that's off to the side. In my head, I think of them as right-hand characters because they're often
right-hand men.
Take, for example, Sherlock Holmes. In any of the retellings of Sherlock Holmes, Watson is basically the
main character. He is our protagonist. We're watching Sherlock through his eyes. Now in modern police
procedurals, generally you put the detective in the protagonist spot and we watch the person who is
making all of the big discoveries, we're watching through their eyes.
But Sherlock doesn't do that. We watch it through Watson's eyes. It gives the story a very different feel,
very different priorities. You can compare it with something like Iron Man, that puts the genius right in
the driver's seat, versus looking at it from the point of view of the right-hand man.
Other examples, Ferris Bueller. Ferris Bueller seems on the first blush to be the protagonist of Ferris
Bueller, but actually he's the situation. He's the setting. He doesn't change from beginning to end. He is
Ferris, and he ends Ferris. The character who actually changes is Cameron, the right-hand man. It gives it
a wistful, dreamy, softer view.
How about Nick Carraway, from The Great Gatsby? Gatsby is the obvious protagonist choice. He's the
one who's chasing the girl. He's the one who's doing all the crazy stuff. And instead we're looking at it
from a distance, from a remove. Nick is the one watching, and it changes the atmosphere of The Great
Gatsby entirely.
Sometimes choosing the right-hand character can also make an unbearable situation more bearable to
look at. Emma Donoghue wrote a book called Room about a young woman who is abducted and then
sexually abused by her captor. She's kept in a single room. And the story is told from the point of view of
her child who grew up in that room. It makes a horrific situation have a completely different feel to it,
because through a child's eyes, we're seeing a completely different angle with the edges shaved off of it.
I'm going to tell you the story of how I once wrote a right-hand character so that you can hear some of
the challenges and experiences of it. So I wrote a right-hand character as the main character in my
standalone novel, All the Crooked Saints.
Now here's what you need to know about All the Crooked Saints. I wrote that novel as my first project,
after completing The Raven Cycle. Now The Raven Cycle was four books. I had been drafting it
continuously for about six years, and it was an old, old idea that I'd come up with when I was 19, so
really The Raven Cycle had been rotating around in my head for a very long time. And I knew that unless
I worked very hard, the very next thing I wrote was just going to feel like yet more Raven Cycle. I'd been
practicing so hard to make sure that every single one of those books felt like the other Raven Cycle
books, that those habits weren't going to break themselves.
Also, we have a tendency as creators to, again, fall into our default settings. We have certain character
types we prefer. We have certain character shapes that make sense to us, story styles that we enjoy,
aspects of setting that we look at again and again. And that's fine when you're writing one book or two
books or three books, but I didn't want to be one of those authors that has written 25 novels and people
can't tell the difference at the end of their career between them, unless they think really hard about
what the cover looks like.
It can be really easy to fall into doing the same kind of dynamics again and again and you just change the
details, the names and the theme stay the same. I was petrified of doing that. I wanted everything to
feel Stiefvaterian, but still to be a grab bag. You never know if you're going to love one of my books or
hate it. You just know it's going to give you a Stiefvater experience.
So with All the Crooked Saints, I thought, no, I have to do a hard palate cleanser. It's got to be
completely different. And when I went through the process that I've just described to you, going through
mood, idea, premise, setting, story, character, at every step of the way, when I had an automatic choice
that I wanted to make, I told myself I had to pick a different one. I wasn't allowed to just take my easy
defaults because I would write the same kinds of stories that I always do. So different points of view,
different settings, different story styles, different everything.
So when I was looking at the plot of this, when I was looking at saints who were performing miracles and
refusing to help the folks that were coming to them, lest they get the taboo on them, there is one saint
there, the saint Daniel, one of the three cousins that's featured in the book. And during the course of
the book, he falls in love with one of the pilgrims and breaks the rules.
Now in any other world, that saint is the one I would have chosen to drive that story. He's the one who
broke the rules. And he's the one that is driven out into the desert as his darkness comes upon him. And
I could have written an entire book about him grappling with that, and then coming to, you know,
understand that he needs his family instead of sacrificing himself. And that would be a very active, direct
three-act plot.
And I thought, okay, but you can't. You can't. What you're going to do is you're going to pick a right-
hand character. So the character I chose, and I use choose liberally because one of the other decisions I
made was I decided to tell this story in an omniscient point of view, which is impossible, which means
that you're in everyone's head basically. But the main character, the real story it is, is Beatrice.
And I chose Beatrice, one of the other cousins, the cousin who stays behind, because she was a
character who was looking at the situation and she had been defined as being removed from it, from
being passive. I wanted to ask myself, can I take someone whose chief power, whose chief skill, is
thought, and turn them into my active protagonist? And it was fascinating because every single plot
element along the way that I had to throw at her, and again, I did have to throw it at her because she
remained passive for so long, had to be an intellectual exercise. And in the end, the climax had to be an
intellectual one that I was proving with concrete elements, lightning and whatnot.
But still at the end of the day, so much of the book was reversed upside down. It was the hardest book
that I've ever had to write for many reasons. But chief amongst them was that I was driving the engine
with the internal abstract plot instead of the concrete, and with a right-hand character instead of left.
Now that said, I think that it gives the book a dreamy, folkloric, tall tale point of view that you just
wouldn't have gotten if you chose Daniel's camera instead, because Daniel's would have been too
intense. Would it have been more like a previous Stiefvater novel? Absolutely. But you know what? I
don't regret it for a second. It was the palate cleanser. It stretched me in ways that I didn't even think
that I could be stretched, and it made sure that my next book was something completely different.
VIDEO 11:
Many years ago, I read a novel called Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You by Peter Cameron. The
main character's name was James. I don't remember a whole lot about what happened in it. It was one
of those quiet coming of age novels. It took place, I remember, after the end of high school but before
college. And all I remember is that James had a sister named Jillian and he kept on daydreaming about
moving to Iowa. The thing that I remember most about this novel though, is how I felt when I finished it.
I remember that I read it and I closed the last page and I felt bereft.
What was so strange about this was that the end of the novel wasn't sad. That wasn't why I was bereft. I
was bereft because James was such a specific and interesting character that I felt like I missed him. I felt
like I'd met a real person, an interesting person, and it occurred to me when I closed the book that I
would never see him again. I would never hear his voice again. And emotionally, I missed him. I was
blown away. I had no idea that book characters could be that way. I had no idea that a book could do
that to you, and it revolutionized the way I thought about putting people into my books. I thought, "No
more am I going to write book characters."
I knew what book characters could do before that. I knew that book characters were predictable. I knew
that they had specific attributes. I knew that you always could count on how they were going to react
within the plot. I knew they were specific. But I had no idea they could feel like real humans. "No more,"
I thought, "am I going to write book characters. No. Now I am going to write humans that appear in
books as much as possible."
Now, that said, man. I mean, great characters, right? What makes a great character? They're rich,
specific, interesting, larger than life. They stick with us for years. We name our dogs after them, our kids
after them, our mint plants after them. But I can't think about my characters like that when I first begin
to brainstorm them. Even though that's the goal, I can't keep them in my head with that amount of
specificity at this point or I quickly lose track of how they actually relate to my plot, and most
importantly, to each other. Because equally important in a group of characters is not just the
personalities, but the spaces between the personalities, and when there's so much noise, I can't see it. I
can't hold it in my head. You might be able to, but I certainly can't.
So this next section is going to be how I start out with my characters. I start out with them as coat
hangers, skeletons, paper dolls. They're tropes, they're types. Let's see how I do it. Let's talk about
sitcoms for a hot second. Now I don't think that most people would think there's a lot of commonality
between a Stiefvater novel and sitcoms, but high have to admit I've learned a ton from them. You just
can't beat them for elegance, for efficiency, for efficiency of building compelling character groups
because after all, what else is a sitcom?
Yes, they have their window dressing. They have their conceit, but really from week to week, what
keeps people coming back for 22 minutes is the way the personalities interact with each other. They are
fearfully and awesomely constructed. These tight groups of characters that are just larger than life. Now
do sitcom characters actually work in a Stiefvater novel? No, obviously they're too exaggerated, they're
stereotypes, they're tropes, but they work for reminding me of how people fit together. Of how if you
have different types of people, you don't have to always have fascinating plot to create dynamic
tension. If you have the correctly assembled character group, they will create their own tension.
Organically sitcom friend groups are always constructed to always have a little bit of unrest, a little bit of
tension. They never come exactly to play because there's just enough disagreement or opposing
character personality types. That it means that there's always going to be fireworks, hilarity, sitcoms.
They're also predictable. They're satisfyingly predictable. We can go in week after week and guess how
the characters might react to situations. That's where the comedy comes from. You can take the same
friend group and send them into a laundromat, or you can send them up to the moon. And because you
know these characters, you know that they are going to have conflicts with each other and conflicts with
the situation in agreeably predictable ways. They also remind us, they remind me as a writer to make
sure that there's only one of every kind. So for instance, you might have the smart one, the dumb one,
the shy one, the underdog. You would never have two shy ones, two underdogs because it would
become noisy. It would just be unnecessary. You wouldn't have to Phoebe's in a friend group, you
wouldn't have to J.D'S in the cast of scrubs.
No, you wanted to make sure that you have only one of each opposing type. The mean one, the gentle
one, the expert, and then you throw them all together and see what happens. Now you can see this
dynamic and interesting and clever character group writing in almost anything that has a substantial
fandom or fan fiction, because you can't really get good fan fiction or fandom without the readers. Being
able to generally predict what your character group is going to do in relation to each other and groups.
That's where the fun comes in. If you take for instance, Tony Stark and I can never remember Captain
America's real name, Steve.
I can't remember his last name. Don't help me, Steve. I got nothing. Right, okay. We're just going to call
him Steve. Tony and Steve like they're our best friends. Yeah. So if you imagine Tony and Steve in a room
together, you can predict what kind of conflict is going to come from self centered Tony and altruistic
Steve. You would never have to have the same type in the room. And likewise, if you took Tony and
Steve and you sent them to the laundromat, or you shot them to the moon or sent them to fight aliens,
you can predictably see how they would interact with that problem, but also with each other. And that's
where the satisfaction of the character dynamics come in.
So that's where I really have learned a lot from sitcoms. Yes, I want my characters to end up being rich
and nuanced and complicated, fully human like James from Someday this pain will be useful to you, but I
know that in their core, they need to start as a type because I also want them to be predictable and a
satisfyingly unique character grouping, which means that I will have to work less at throwing plot at
them to get them to do something interesting. They make their own gravy. Now you can see this play
out across the Raven Cycle, where I've constructed little groups of characters that interact with each
other. You've got your Gansey, your Ronan, your Adam, your Noah. The academic scholar, the
persnickety judgy one. That's not Blue, that's Adam, the angry one, the dead one. I would never have
two Gansey's, two Ronan's, two Noah's, two Adams. Now the way they're constructed is to make sure
that, I mean, a Ronan and an Adam are almost always going to be at conflict. A Ronan and a Gansey
have so many ways to create conflict.
I have to throw very little at them to get them to be interesting. Likewise, if you look at the women of
Fox Way, you have a Persephone, a Maura and a Calla. You have the airy fairy one, you have the
pragmatic funny one and you have the brusque unflinching one. And they have their roles to play and
you know that they're going to create interesting conflict to each other. And you also know that if
someone comes to them, you can predict how they're going to react to this brand new character in ways
that become satisfying to the reader. Now you can practice this yourself by looking at your own friend
group and your own family, and see if you can reduce these very complicated rich people to just tropes.
Stylize them as much as possible and see if you can create your own sitcom cast of characters from
them.
VIDE0 12:

Now that I have my tropey characters set into my story. I'm ready to turn them into humans to make
them feel real. So, how do I do that? How do I turn them from these stylized tropes into living, breathing
characters that are memorable? I used to think it was about detail, specificity. I used to be a big fan of
those character questionnaires. You know? The worksheets where you fill out the characters, hair, color,
and eye color and their hobbies and what their backstory is. Yeah. Those don't work for me. It doesn't
make a real person for me.
What it does is it will give me a consistent character that is unique from my other characters. And, they
will move predictably through a story. But, when I do that, I can never get breath in their lungs. They
never turn real. To me using details like that is like, it's like thinking Clark Kent and Superman are
different people because one of them wears glasses, or it's like dressing up your Barbie doll in multiple
outfits and thinking that it's a different doll in each outfit.
No. It's like when you put a hat on and your dog thinks that you're a stranger. Details don't make
personality. They're a response to personality. I'm a bagpiper, as we've discovered in this seminar, but
you could take 20 bagpipers and put them in a room and you're not going to find that we're 20 Maggie
Stiefvaters. I promise you I've met 19 other bagpipers at least and they're not really like me because we
all play bagpipes for a different reason. What you're trying to do when you give a character details,
specificity is you need to know why that specificity exists. That's actually character building. Discovering
the rules for what manifests the aesthetic.
Now, how do I accomplish this? In my old age? I steal. Yeah, I'm a thief. I still real people all the time.
Now, not all of a person. I don't need all of a person aside from it being unethical, but also I only need a
small piece. I need a beating heart and then I can build the rest around it. The reason why I need to steal
from reality is because reality is so much more confusing and interesting and shocking than what we can
just imagine. If we don't steal from reality, what we tend to do is we tend to grab either the cliche or we
grab what our reaction would be to a behavior.
I don't know if any of you guys are artists, but as I said, I am. And, one of the artists that I really
appreciate is Maxfield Parrish. He is an old dead illustrator and he does amazing fantasy illustrations.
They're very marvelous. And, in many of them, he has these extremely fascinating faceted mountains.
And, I once saw a photograph of his studio and on his desk, he had a pile of rocks, small rocks. And, the
reason why he had these rocks on his desk was because he was using them as models for his mountains.
And, I thought that was such a great example of how we artists steal from reality. You don't need exactly
a mountain, but you need enough of a mountain to see the surprising way that light plays on the edges
of things. So, you're not always drawing the same thing.
Now, an example of how reality is strange and unusual in comparison to what we might expect is I have
children when one of them was very small, Thing One, we'll call her. When she was very small, she was a
very anxious child. She is still a very anxious child. She kind of vibrates all the time. She was a very
anxious child and she was very fearful child. Things were always shocking, her surprising her, frightening
her. And, I recall that on this particular evening I had put her to bed and my husband/lover was off
working and I was watching a movie called Pan's Labyrinth. Have you seen it? It's a little scary. It's a
horror.
The thing about Pan's Labyrinth is that I guess it's not that it's incredibly scary. It's that it's permeated by
a sense of dread. It's a very dreadful movie in general. It's also very violent. Don't watch it with your
children. Anyway, I wasn't watching it with my children. I was sitting on the couch, watching it by myself
and I was kind of doing this number because I was watching the scene where there's this monster, it's
just bitten the head off a couple of fairies, tiny fairies. And, it's got eyeballs and it's hands. Have you
seen this on the internet? Yeah. It's a white creature. No eyes up here. Eyes there. Yeah. I'm looking at
this and I hear "Mama?" And, I turned around and there's my small anxious child, normally vibrating,
and she's like a ghost in the hallway. And she's looking right at the monster that is looking back at her.
I look from her to the monster. She has no expression on her face. I think this can't be good. She says
she needs a glass of water. She can't sleep. So, I get her a glass of water, take her back to her bed. She is
absolutely silent. I put her in the bed. We have not said anything about the monster. Normally it's a
huge fight to get her to go into bed. There's night, there's dark, et cetera, et cetera. And, she just quietly
goes into bed. And I think "Oh, man, this isn't going to be good." And, I go, "Are you all right?" She said.
"You got your water." Finally, I can't take it. I say, "And, about that monster." And, she looks at me and
she says with such a scathing tone, "Mama, it was a man in a suit." And, then she turned over and she
went to sleep.
That's the kind of thing that if I were just writing that child predictably, as a character, she is so anxious
all the time. Instead I would have predicted a completely different reaction for her, but reality is
shocking and dissonant and that kind of surprising color is what I'm looking for when I steal from real
life. We'll talk more about that in a second.
I don't have to steal every character. I know I don't have to steal every character. I know I can do some
characters just from scratch. But, much like artists, I know that the farther I get from real life from
studying real life, the more I default back to a single type. Here's an example. I could ask all of you guys
now to draw a picture of a human. And, no matter if you're an artist or not, you would probably draw
me something that looks recognizably human, some configuration of eyes, nose, ears a head. Whatever.
If I then slipped a photograph to you of a actual live human and said, "Now draw that human." You
would probably take a little bit longer and draw something that looked slightly more like that person.
Even if you weren't good at drawing humans still you'd give it a shot to make it look specific. Then if I
said, "Here's another person," you would do it again. And, it would look different once more from the
first one I've done. And then the more of those people you drew from life, the more you would learn,
the surprising shapes that people actually have instead of that default human that you originally drew.
Now, I take all of the pictures from you and say, "Now draw me a picture again, just from memory." You
would probably draw one of two things. You'd either draw something that looked like the last person
you drew from memory, or you would start to revert back to that default type.
That's just what we do. That's what artists do. It's difficult to stop thinking about that default. Which as
we pointed out is often just you. And, we don't want to keep on drawing ourselves again and again and
again. So, what I do is I keep on looking at reality. I keep finding the surprising ways that people manifest
themselves and if I have to draw a tertiary character without sealing someone from life, I'm not going to
lose sleep over it. A secondary character? Also not going to lose sleep over it. Can I do a protagonist
without reality? Makes me a little bit nervous. I like to have a real human heart.
I'm going to tell you the story of Adam Parish. Adam Parish is a character from the Raven Cycle. And, if
you haven't read the Raven Cycle, you should probably go and read it in its entirety before listening to
this story, because it won't make any sense otherwise. All right, that's not true. You could probably get
away with just reading the Raven Boys. I'm going to tell you the story of how Adam came to be, because
I want you to hear how much of a human I feel like I need to steal for reality. Sometimes it's a big
gesture, but sometimes it is just a human heart as I said before.
All right, this story begins years before the Raven Cycle, I was touring for the Shiver trilogy. Like I said, I
was on planes all the time I was touring one day out of every three so I was always in planes and always
in hotels. And, I was starting to feel like I was getting a little rusty. I felt like every day was kind of the
same day. And, I felt like I wasn't changing in any measurable way. And, I was feeling a little bad that I
used to be a full time artist, but I felt like I was stagnating. I wasn't getting any better. So, I thought, "All
right, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start bringing a sketchbook with me and I'll start drawing
people from life because, I'm terrible at drawing people from life and yeah, we'll see if I can get better
on this tour." So, I brought this sketchbook with me everywhere. And, what was very annoying about
this is, that if you are an artist, you already know the frustrating thing about drawing people from life,
which is that they are alive.
They're always moving. They're always scratching their head. They're eating a sandwich. They're shifting
their chin from one way to another. They're rubbing their ear. They're touching their nose. You're
probably moving right now, watching this video. Anyway, it was very annoying because people were
always changing their poses. As I was watching them in the middle of the airport. And, I'm giving you
this as backstory. So you understand that when I got onto a plane and realized that my seatmate was
leaning against his hand with his hat over his head, completely motionless and I thought he might be
dead. My first thought was, "I will draw him first and then check for a pulse." Okay. He wasn't actually
dead. He was just a very deep sleep. Anyway, so I sat down next to him and gloriously. He, he slept all
through takeoff and I got to do a nice sketch of him.
And, I was thinking, "Yes, awesome. I love it when people don't move." And then right, as I got to the
end of it, I heard this soft Southern voice say, "Is that me?" "No, it is another man with his hat pulled
over his face in an airplane. It's not you." Luckily he was flattered. He was happy that I had drawn him.
And, he was so by all of this that we struck up a conversation. And, because I was in that stealing sort of
mood, I said, "Hey, you want to tell me your life story?" And, he said, no, he didn't want to tell me his
life story. But, he said, "I'll tell you the story of my hand."
Now, for clarification, you should know that one of his hands was kind of weird and I had drawn it that
way in the drawing. And, so he told me this story, this very elaborate story and his sweet, soft, Southern
voice about how he was a man who never lost his temper and he prided himself on never losing his
temper because in his family, temper was quite a thing that had caused problems. And, yet he had been
in a bar and his sister had been there and a man had impugned her honor, and in a fit of not anger, but
righteous fury, he had broken his fist on this man's face. And, now he was stuck with the scar, the
misshapen hand for the rest of his life. And, I heard this story and you know what? In the old days I
would have taken it at face value. I would have just stolen the story that he told me and just thought,
awesome. I'm stealing from real life. There it is. Great story. Very great.
But, listening more closely and digging deeper to the why of the details I thought, "Well, for starters, I
don't actually think this story is true." I'm not even sure he has a sister. And, secondly, the only true part
that I could be sure of was how he looked when he told me this story, he was obviously so ashamed of
this misshapen hand and he was so ashamed and so certain he didn't want even a stranger on an
airplane to think that he had lost his temper like his father used to lose his temper, that he had to tell
me this elaborate story of his sister's honor being insulted by a man in a bar excusing the punch that he
had thrown.
And, so the real moment that I stole, was that emotion that came of losing your temper and then having
to wear the shame of that mistake for the rest of your life. And, that is what became the heart and soul
of Adam Parish. Now is that as neat and tidy as saying, "Oh right, well, I see that that person wore Doc
Martins for this reason. And, I'm going to give his character doc Martins because of it." No, it's not that
simple. It's a lot closer to that abstract language I was telling you about. It's a feeling of who a person is a
lot of times and that's who became Adam Parish.
VIDEO 13:
Okay, exercise time. I don't mean like exercise, exercise, just like last time, we're actually just talking
about a head exercise, but you know what? It's actually been a while since our last fake exercise time,
which was really an exercise. So, if you need to get up and move around and get some blood flow going,
drink some water, maybe some caffeine, now is the time. I'll wait. You can just pause it. Okay. Now, time
for the intellectual exercise part, this is what we're exercising. Write what you know. I know it's that
thing again. I know I said that I didn't like it as advice, but maybe a little, maybe I do like it a little. I don't
know. All right. Here's what I want you to do as character practice. I want you to try and write yourself
as a character. I want you to think of yourself as a character. Namely, I want you to do this, I want you to
steal yourself if at all possible. I want you to imagine something that's specific about you.
So, for instance, all right, let's talk about my car, right? The crazy car. The one that I blew up racing the
guy in the Corvette. So, it's a Mitsubishi Evo, it's a boy racer, a little tiny tuner car that I've pulled out the
engine and put in a more giant engine. It's got a spoiler, like I said, it's yellow with stripes on the side,
splattered paint. It's so loud that you can't listen to anything except for EDM music in it. I've gotten
pulled over for just being loud. Once, I even got pulled over across a four lane highway, the cop pulled
me over and I said, "Officer, I wasn't speeding. What did you pull me over for?" And he said, "It looked
loud." That's the car. I mean, the car is basically a driving disaster, a midlife crisis on wheels.
Why do I drive it? Why do I drive it? Now, there are lots of people who drive cars that are kind of like
that, but they don't usually seem like they're the same kind of people as me. We all drive those kinds of
cars for different reasons. So, if I were making myself into a character, using that car as some evidence, I
would be stealing myself to find out what makes me feel like I need to be so obviously recognized as an
individual, even outside my car, what am I solving for? And then, I ask myself, do other character things
that I do also support this, is this why I wear black all the time? Is this why I have big Doc Martens? What
other things are there about me that support or conflict with this information and see if I can reduce
myself to the why, what is the rule of it?
And then, this is the hard part, take away the car, take away the big black Doc Martens, take away the
black eyeliner, take away the bagpipes, the bombastic instruments, and instead say, "All right, now,
what other details can I give this character that is based on the rules of me? That mean the same thing."
Can I take the character of me and put me into a book that's about, I don't know, horseback riding,
would I then also be riding a flashy horse, so that people were always looking at me? What does it look
like when you pick me up and put me in different scenarios, still following the rules of me? So, you're
following the rules of you, and keep in mind, because you're a complicated person, you have infinite
rules, you have way too many rules for a character because here's another thing that's important about
me.
I really care about other people becoming the best possible version of themselves. That seems to be
inherently at odds with someone who always wants to be noticed when they go out in the car. One
suggests, I don't know, maybe narcissism, if you were just looking at it with a glancing image. And the
other one suggests adjusts deep altruism. These things seem like opposites, but they exist in me because
people are complicated. Remember what I said? Characters are subtractive. So, you can, actually, if
you're being good, steal yourself or other people multiple times. So, in this exercise, don't only steal
yourself. Now, look at your best friend, look at the person that you're in love with. Look at your siblings,
look at your parents, see what you can steal from them and rebuild characters with different details.
This is how you make characters that live and breathe and walk off that page.
Have you ever hugged a book? I mean, really hugged one. I mean, just gotten to a point in it where it
satisfies you so deeply that you're forced to close it and hug it to your chest. I remember the last time I
did it, I was reading the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I have mixed feelings about the entire
book, but chapter nine, chapter nine was perfect. I got to the end of it and I just, I had to close it, and I
had to hold it to my chest. Perfect chapter. Just what I wanted. I was absolutely satisfied. At the
beginning of this seminar, I talked about one of the things that I do, is always think about the reader.
Well, no, not always. I think about the reader at the appropriate time, so that I don't get stopped. This is
one of the moments where I start thinking about the reader, when I'm building characters right in this
moment, because I'm thinking about how to satisfy them.
Now, what is satisfaction? Sometimes people think that satisfaction is getting what they want, and
sometimes people think that satisfaction is getting what they need. Sometimes they think it's a happy
ending, but the truth is satisfaction can come at any moment in a book. Satisfaction comes from an
exquisite release of tension. It comes from giving the reader something that sometimes they didn't even
realize they wanted or needed, but that you've been promising all along. Sometimes it comes from
giving them something that they've been secretly, desperately hoping would happen, but had begun to
expect would never actually happen. The exquisite release of tension. And I bring it up now because
when you're writing characters, at this stage, you can always be looking for ways, when you're
constructing them, to give yourself opportunities for satisfying scenes. What's an example of this? All
right. Those of you who have read Harry Potter, you know that Harry Potter is the hero and there's an
underdog, Neville Longbottom.
He is always in the background, messing up, being soft-spoken, being not Harry, and there's a moment
in the final conclusion of the story, spoiler, where after all of this time, he finally gets to pull out a hero
sword. And it's so satisfying because it's what you've wanted for him this whole time, but he's never
gotten it. He's the underdog and here it is handed to him, that makes it satisfying, giving them what they
thought would never happen, but hoped would happen for him. It also comes from giving a moment of
contrast. So, for instance, if you have a character like the Hulk, and the Hulk is set upon a bad guy and
the Hulk smashes the guy silly, that's fine. It's predictable. It's exactly what you expect of the Hulk. The
Hulk is strong. The Hulk is able to take on someone in a fight, he smashes the bad guy. There's no
problem with that.
However, if you have a moment where he's faced with a bad guy and the bad guy completely obliterates
the Hulk, that can sometimes be satisfying because it's such a surprise. It's the exquisite release of
tension. We always wanted to see the Hulk finally lose, and now we've lost it. Sometimes, it means
taking a character who you think will never break and breaking them. Sometimes, it means taking a
character who you think will never be soft and think about other people, and making them think about
other people. There is a scene in The Raven Boys that I knew was going to exist before I began writing,
and it's a scene spoiler, I guess, kind of, it's not a ruiner, but it's a spoiler. So, if you haven't read the
book, you can cover your ears now and go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
Right. So, it's a scene where Adam's father, who was a real bag of dicks, is punching Adam and punches
him down the stairs and Adam's losing his hearing, and then he's continuing to beat Adam. And in this
moment, Ronan Lynch arrives and punches him. I like to think it's hugely satisfying as a scene because
it's something that you never expected of him. You hoped it would happen, I mean, in your darkest
dreams, you thought that maybe possibly he might have a heart of gold in there, but there was no
evidence, really, for the rest of the book. And yet, here he is, and it's hugely satisfying because it's the
exquisite release of tension. It's a surprising release of tension. It's what the reader has always hoped for
and you have delivered emotionally.
And you're looking for it here, in the character moments, because as you build a character, if you build a
character to be absolutely one way, you're promising that at some point, they're going to maybe be not
that way. And what do I mean by this? If you write a character who is agoraphobic, they're terribly afraid
of going outside, you have basically promised the reader that at some point you are going to put that
character outside. If you have given a character, a sibling who drowned and they were unable to save
that sibling, you're pretty much guaranteeing that at some point in that book, you're going to put that
character back next to a body of water and they are going to be trying to save someone or they
themselves will be in that water.
Those are the moments that you're looking for with satisfaction. So, as you build your characters, think,
"All right, can I give them an absolute, that I know I'm going to push upon later?" It's important to note
that the opposite of satisfaction is not boredom, but rather dissatisfaction. Now, there are many traits
that you can give to your characters that are dissatisfying to readers, and I am not telling you that you
shouldn't give them to your characters. In fact, your characters should not be universally glorious and
perfect. Real humans are complicated. They are neither, fully good, nor fully bad, and that shaggy
cognitive dissonance around the edge of your hero is partially what makes them specific and real.
Now, it's of course, depends upon your genre, but still, yeah, nobody wants a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu,
goody two-shoes who's fully evolved and perfect and right in every step of the way. No, we're not
writing Mary Poppins here. Although, I think Mary Poppins actually was a little bit condescending, which
counts as a character flaw, right? She was like, "Oh yeah, I know better than you." All right, moving on.
So, some character traits that you give to characters are dissatisfying because they're unpleasant. The
character is selfish or the character is cruel, or the character is petty. And sometimes the traits that we
give to characters that are dissatisfying, are dissatisfying to readers because they promise, or seem to
promise, a passive storyline. If you give your character depression, or you make your character grieving,
or you put your character imprisoned in some way, you have to be mindful of choices like that. Not
because, again, you're allowed to use them. You should use them. Some level of dissatisfaction makes
satisfaction more potent, in fact, but you need to know that you're going to have to release that
dissatisfaction in some meaningful way.
VIDEO 14:
I debated whether or not this section point of view belonged in act one or act two of this seminar,
internal or writing. It was like one of those games, you know one of these things is not like the other.
Before this moment, everything I've been talking about has been concepts that have no right or wrong
answer. All you've been trying to solve is what story do you want to write? Point of view isn't quite like
that.
It's not that there's a right or a wrong answer per se, because nothing in writing is really cut and dried.
It's just that it has a more objective solution. It's a tool. And because it's a tool, it doesn't quite belong in
part one, either because tools are for the reader. The story, while it's still up in your head, it doesn't
actually need to have point of view decisions made because for you, the camera can just be anywhere it
needs to be.
The point of view decision is part of translating it from abstract to concrete for them. So technically it
belongs in part two. So what we're actually going to do is we're going to start talking about it here and
finish talking about it in the actual section on writing.
Because the truth of the matter is that even though it's a tool, and even though it's got some objective
decision-making to it, it's still something that I have to think about before I can start writing things
down.
So let's look at the first decision we make about point of view, which is this, first or third person. Before
we talk about decision-making, let's review what first person is, what second person is, what third
person is. Let's review the people.
First person. "When I walked into the room, I couldn't help, but notice how nice Amanda looked. She
looked up at me and waved with an expression I couldn't interpret." Now in first person, you'll notice
that it's phrased as I walked into the room and we only know what the narrator knows. We can't tell
what Amanda is thinking because the narrator doesn't know what Amanda is thinking.
Third person. "When Polly walked into the room, she couldn't help but notice how nice Amanda looked.
Amanda looked up at Polly and waved with an expression. Amanda, couldn't interpret." Now you'll
notice in third person, we've gotten rid of the I, instead we can see the narrator's name, Polly, but you'll
also notice we still only see what it is that Polly sees. We still have no idea what Amanda is thinking.
And second person is a kind of a fake point of view actually. Well, it's a fake distinction. It's really just
first person, but referring to someone else as the narrator. It's like the rock song version of narration.
"When you walked into the room, you couldn't help but notice how nice Amanda looked. She looked up
at you and waved with an expression you couldn't interpret."
You'll notice it follows the exact same rules as first person. You still can't tell what it is that Amanda is
thinking. You're still only in the head of the narrator, only that the narrator is someone else that you're
looking at.
And then omniscient lets you look inside everybody's heads. Usually it's third person. "When Polly
walked into the room, she couldn't help but notice how nice Amanda looked. Amanda looked up at Polly
and waved. Amanda couldn't help but notice how nice Polly looked, too."
Notice that we can actually see inside Amanda's head as well. We're head hopping. I used to think I
didn't like first person. When I was a young reader if I was sitting in the stacks of the library and I often
was, I was basically raised by feral librarians. When I was sitting in the stacks of the library, pulling books
off the shelf that had the little unicorn or sci-fi sticker on the spine, I would open them up and I would
see if they were in first person or third person.
And after a while, I started putting the first person books back on the shelf. I just figured I wouldn't like
them. After all in my past history, I was less likely to finish them if I pick them up off the shelf. I know
now looking back as an adult, that I actually didn't have a preference for first person or third person.
The two of them can actually read very similarly actually. What I was actually selecting for back then was
a kind of story, because I said in the introduction that first person and third person are one of the few
objective decisions we get to make about writing at this stage. And that's because they have very
different pros and cons.
They are good for one kind of story, bad for a different kind of story. So when I was selecting back then
as a young reader for first or third person voice, I wasn't actually selecting for voice. I was actually
selecting for a preference of a kind of story.
And I tended to like the kinds of stories that were told in third person better. So what are these pros and
cons? Let's take a look at them. First person is immediate. It closes the distance between you and the
character. It shrinks the story, sets the tone and the mood, and it's best for conveying emotional and
internal change. It's very inefficient at covering external events and it is biased and limited by what the
narrator can and would observe.
Now, third person offers distance. It opens the camera beyond the internal landscape. It expands the
story. It's best at conveying external or broad change. It's efficient at covering external events. It has a
neutral tone and mood. With the notable exception of close third, which operates almost like first
person in that it gets really inside a character's head, which can offer a bit more of tonal color than
normal third.
For many stories, this means that the obvious point of view choice is right in front of you. They lend
themselves obviously to first person or third person. An emotional intimate coming of age story, first
person. A sweeping epic drama that needs to cover lots of characters, third person.
That's not to say that you have to choose those. You can take the unexpected choice, but know that it
could fight you and also do it for a good reason unless you have a good reason. Pick the thing that tells
the story in the most easiest, natural way.
For example, there's a novel called Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. It's been turned into a movie. You can
watch the movie. You can read the book. The book is very short. It's by my editor, actually of the Raven
Cycle books, David Levithan. So there's very short volume takes place only in one night and it's in first
person, and it's a very intimate coming of age story.
The first page describes the narrator as he hits a drum. He's a musician. He's also telling you, the reader
how he feels about being a musician, about music in general, what it feels like to him. It's a character
moment. The entire first page only accomplishes one thing, he hits a drum. That's it.
No other plot point is accomplished in an entire page. All you know is what he thinks about music and
that he's hit a drum. Now, if that was told in third person, then obviously it would be a throwaway line.
He would hit the drum in one sentence and then we could move on to more plot.
But that's not what Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is. It's an emotional journey and it's exploded over the
course of the book that one night and were following their internal landscape. We don't need it in third
person. We need it in first person. We want to be right there in his head as he changes emotionally,
because that's where the real tension is happening in that story.
Now, compare that with a project like Game of Thrones or one of the Lord of the Rings books. They're
huge epics that cover massive amount of plot events. The story is about the world. It's zoomed out. And
if you were trying to do that in first person to look at each character's emotional landscape with the
same attention as Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, not only would it take you a billion pages to get
through it. But also you would lose sight of the bigger picture because you would be so zoomed in to the
intimate landscape. Use the right tool for the right job.
The difficulty arises when you're working with a novel that's neither one nor the other, at least not
obviously. It's not an intimate coming of age story, but neither is it an epic drama that covers decades.
What do you do with something that is on the range in between like a character-driven thriller?
Well, you can ask yourself some questions. Is it a story about the character or is it a story about the
world the character inhabits? Is it a story about a single person or is it a story about the shapes between
people? How much of the story is about the movement of external plot and how much of it is about the
movement of the characters' internal landscape?
Move the needle towards third person if it's the external plot and move the needle towards first person
if it's internal landscape. Generally speaking, the correct number of point of views, the correct number
of cameras on the ground is the fewest that will get the job done right.
It can be really tempting especially as a new author to grab an extra camera when you need to look at
something new. It's very frustrating after all when you have an interesting tense moment and your
narrator is nowhere around to see what's happening with the plot over here. So the temptation can be
to grab another camera to show the reader.
I remember for instance, when I was writing the Scorpio Races, there is a scene where something bad is
happening to water horses in a barn. And when I was writing that book, every single scene played out in
my head first like a movie and then I would just transcribe what happened.
And I remember that with this scene, I could see everything happening at once. And the tension came
from knowing what was happening to the horse over here, while my main character was on their way.
But that doesn't work because his point of view is the only one I have. He's the only camera I have. In my
mind, it's omniscient. I can see everything.
That's not the way it's going to play out in the book. I had to find a way to create that tension only from
his point of view, which meant translating it into a single point of view instead of omniscient. Could I
have grabbed another camera? I guess technically yes. There's nothing right or wrong in writing.
But practically speaking, no, I'm not going to grab an extra point of view camera, a villain cam in the
middle of a book that otherwise is perfectly fine with just the two point of views that I've chosen. You
don't break the rules just to solve a logistical problem. You just problem solve harder.
One of the reasons why you don't grab as many cameras as possible is because every time you add a
camera, you are dividing the reader's attention. You're dividing their focus because they're
remembering names and backstories and whatever. But you're also dividing their emotional attention,
their emotional investment.
And depending on the genre, readers can be pretty good about taking on multiple characters, but at a
certain point they will break and they will put that book down. When you put in a new point of view, it
needs to be because the book absolutely needs it for tone, for plot, for voice. Not because you can't
think of how to solve a problem without putting a camera on the ground there.
Now, there are some books that work despite the fact that they have a billion cameras, but it's because
they work on the conceit of having a billion cameras. I'm thinking of the book World War Z, which is a
book about zombies. Well, it's after a zombie invasion and it's entirely in interview form.
So although it's a gajillion first person accounts, the whole point of it is that it's supposed to be a survey.
So it doesn't matter that you are emotionally disconnected from each of those people. The book isn't
asking you to care about their arcs, the book is asking you to care about the world.
So every time you grab a new camera, ask yourself, "Why am I grabbing this camera and do I really need
it?" let's talk briefly about villain cam. Villain cam. Right. I think that villain cam actually has really come
of age. It's had its moment in books now because although it used to be common in certain genres,
thrillers, and whatnot, it's now common in all kinds of books.
I think because of film in all genres of film, we're accustomed to the conceit of villain can. Our
protagonists are having a wonderful life over here and we don't want to interrupt that with some scary
music. So instead, we cut to the villain and we see that they are up to something nefarious. And we
know as a viewer that eventually these two things are going to intersect.
So this conceit is now finding its way more and more into books. This is a good tendency, a bad
tendency. I think it's a neutral tendency. The important thing to remember about points of view is that
the reader doesn't have to love reading every single point of view, but they do need to need them.
By the end of the book, they should understand why it was that they had to trudge through villain cam
or rando cam, because really it could be just any element of plot that is not carried by the main
character. If it's brought in by someone that you're not asking them to actually care about that's villain
cam and rando cam.
All right, here we are at the last moment of the last video before we jump into acts two writing. And
before we do, I want to ask you to do one more exercise. I don't mean jumping jacks still. Although
again, feel free to get a glass of water or some caffeine.
No, the exercise I want you to do is this. I want you to think again about that moment that you closed
your eyes and you thought about the book that you intended to write. Then I want you to sit down and I
want you to write a page from that book, any place in the book, anything that you think that you know
might happen. And I want you to write it from the point of view of your character that you believe is
going to be your main character.
Try writing it in first. Try writing it in third. I do not want you to put this into a manuscript, which is titled
with your manuscripts working title. This is just a manuscript that's called scratch paper or something.
This is just pre-work. It's play. It could be as ugly as you like. You're just trying to get words out there in
your character's voice in first or third, and you're looking at it and you're asking yourself, "Which one
feels like the book that I intended to write? Which one of these is going to take the reader to the place
in my head that I can see right now?" And then we're ready to begin.
VIDEO 15:
Earlier this year, my daughter had a writing assignment. Now my daughter is a pretty creative person
and she's pretty story focused. She's always either reading a book or writing a graphic novel, watching
some media, making some media she's narrative focused. I'm telling you this so that you know that
when I tell you that I walked into the kitchen part of the way through this writing assignment and found
her completely in ruins, you will understand how surprised I was. Particularly because the assignment on
its surface to me looks quite simple. Like something that she would normally ace, she was supposed to
write a 1000 word story, ultimately based on personal experience. Okay, that's fine.
So I had her walk me through the steps that had led her to the point of waterworks, all of her feelings on
her face. Caffeine and chocolate, unable to restore her in any way. I understood the concept of the
assignment quite well. Although the final draft was supposed to be 1000 words. The teacher has set up a
whole bunch of steps before that, to lead them there and I appreciated that. The idea of writing being
more than just the final instead, it was steps leading up to it. A process.
The first step was an easy one. It was supposed to be based on personal experience. So my daughter had
to brainstorm a bunch of different categories of personal memories, and then she was supposed to pick
one in the next step and state a theme for it. All of this was done. It was fine. Then she was supposed to
analyze the story of Cinderella for the structure. The inciting incident, the rising action, the climax,
whatever. Fine, she did that too.
After that was the step where my daughter was supposed to take her personal experience. Then she
was supposed to apply structure to that. Good, fine. She did that too. Then the next step was to write a
500 word rough draft. This was the point at which the feelings came out of her face. This was the point
where she was broken. What was strange about this moment was that my daughter is normally very
quick with a story. If I had just pointed at her and said, write 500 words, give it to me. Now she would
have done it. Instead, she was broken because of the mismatch, the dissonance between the steps and
what she was being asked to do. It was actually harder for her to write the rough draft with all the prep
work because the prep work didn't work with the shape of her brain. It wasn't that the steps were
wrong. It was that the steps were wrong for her.
Nothing in the preparation of structure or theme actually helped her out with what she needed for her
rough draft. She could have done all of those things on the fly. Probably she could have been
encouraged to make a faster and better rough draft with prep work, but it would have required different
steps for whatever her brain needed for translating things abstract to concrete. This system was
designed for someone else.
I'm telling you this now, because we've just gone through many hours of system, many hours of steps to
get you to a rough draft. We are about to talk a lot about rough drafting. We're right at the beginning of
act two of the seminar, writing, actually translating. It's exciting, but it's okay if right now you're thinking
I don't feel ready to write because it's quite possible that you still need to adapt my process to your
brain. It's quite possible that this is you applying structure to Cinderella, and then being asked to write a
rough draft. It's okay if that concept makes feelings come out of your face.
I'm hoping that you'll learn something from the way that I get stuff out of my head and onto paper, but
you might not. It might be a complete mismatch. So we're going to move on to tips and tricks the actual
concrete stuff, but keep in mind that the steps that happened beforehand might need to be a
completely different decoder ring.
A word on rough drafts, if I may. I'm going to lay a truth on you now about rough drafts that you need to
internalize. It is this. You will always have to write a rough draft. Actually, I'm going to hold it up again.
You will always have to write a rough draft. You will always have to write a rough draft. I promise you.
I've been writing since I was as tall as a paperclip, and I've published millions of words and written over a
dozen novels. I have gotten no closer to closing the distance between a rough draft and a final draft. I
still have to, after all of this time, brainstorm, problem solve, write a rough draft, edit it and make a final.
The thing about becoming a better writer is that becoming a better writer doesn't mean that you get to
eliminate those steps. You never do. That's part of what it means to take something from abstract to
concrete. You can't short circuit that becoming a better writer means that what you produce with all of
those steps becomes better. There's no such thing as going straight to final.
Now, I might be able to throw out a short story now that looks pretty, pretty polished without having to
go through drafts because I've practiced a lot. I could do a lot of chapters, maybe that looked pretty
close to final because I've written a lot of words, but I can't hold the complexity of a novel in my head in
the way that I can hold a short story or a chapter. There's always going to be the steps. There's always
going to be a rough draft.
Now I know that many of you are probably nodding going. Yes, I know. I know. I know. Embrace the
rough draft learned to write crap, it's going to be a terrible, revision, blah, blah, blah. I actually don't
want you to embrace the idea that your novel is going to be bad when you first write it. I don't want you
to embrace the idea that a rough draft is crap. That's judging your rough draft by novel terms. A novel is
for them. The final draft is for the reader. The rough draft is for you. Calling it bad is like calling your
scratch paper bad. It's like calling your feathery drawings before your oil painting bad. It's like saying
that when you take all the pieces out of the Ikea box to see if you have all of them before you sit
together, the furniture that that process is bad. The rough draft is a step.
If you start to embrace the idea that the rough draft is a worksheet, it's scratch paper, it's useful for you.
Instead of thinking about just pouring words into it and getting through the part where it stinks. So you
can finally get to the fun part. Instead, you can work on the real priority of a rough draft. Which is this,
creating a document that's productive for you.
Have you guys heard of NaNoWriMo, Na No Wri Mo. National Novel Writing Month, you can look it up
now. See what it's all about. If you don't know, I'll wait. Okay. NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo.org.
Have you looked it up? Yes. Okay. So National Novel Writing Month takes place every November.
Thousands of people across the world all decide that they are going to try and write a novel in the
month of November or at least 50,000 words of a novel. That is the goal.
Now I would write this amount of words professionally anyway and I thought that when I was getting
ready to work on the Scorpio Races, that I had a pretty tight deadline. So I thought here's what I'll do. I
will write the Scorpio Races during NaNoWriMo. That makes sense to me. Let's do it. I mean, I'm going
to finish up this draft that I'm working on now for the Wolves of Mercy Falls and I'm going to jump right
into it. Let's go, November is amazing. I'm a Scorpio baby, November's Scorpio season. We're going to
make some words.
Then I began to write, I poured those words into there. Yeah. I poured them and I poured them and I
watched the word counter and I poured them in there. I thought, I hate this, but I'm falling behind and I
poured more words in there. I tried to remind myself, you've done this before. You've written billions of
words. You've written 60,000 words in a month. You've written a hundred thousand words in a month.
You've got this, Stiefvater. I didn't get this Stiefvater. No matter what I tried to do, it just kept on turning
into crap before my eyes and I told myself, just write it, just write terrible first draft. And then you can
fix it. It doesn't matter if it's awful, just do it, just do it. But it felt useless. It felt like I was writing words
that had no bearing on what I wanted to write at all.
They weren't teaching me anything. It was just making the word count higher and higher and higher. I
tell you the story, not to complain about NaNoWriMo because I've come to grips with NaNoWriMo. I've
discovered that my issue with NaNoWriMo was that I wasn't prepared. I didn't actually know what I was
supposed to be doing in the Scorpio Races. So I tried to jump into it too soon and it was only because I
had written so many books beforehand that I could stop myself from just saying, the aliens are coming
to down now. And instead say, look, we're going to take a moment and go back and do some prep work
because this is not for me. It's not for me. I'm telling you this story now, because I want you to know
that there's a difference between a productive first draft and just piles of words.
I could have continued on. I think I made it through like 35,000 words, something like that. I could have
continued on and poured in 15,000 more words, but it would not have been a good use of my time. I
wasn't learning anything else. I had no scaffolding. I had no understanding of what I was doing and I'm
not good at problem solving in the draft like that. I want you to get to a place where you have developed
a strategy that your rough draft is, yes, it's bad. It doesn't work for a reader because it's not for them,
but I want you to work on making a strategy to make a rough draft that's productive for you.
We've established that a good rough draft means something different for every writer, but that doesn't
mean that there's not universal truths, that we can't apply to the writing process. Theoretically, a final
book works on the following levels, book level, chapter level, paragraph level, and sentence level.
Now it's really easy to fall prey to the trap of perfection, to try and skip past all of the rough draft
messiness, straight to what a final book actually accomplishes and not go in that order. To go straight to
trying to pace the perfect chapter or trying to find the perfect phrasing. But by the time you get to those
tiny levels, those aren't for you. That's high level translation. That's for the reader. That's like trying to
build a house with Lego bricks in the tiniest levels. You need scaffolding first. So the key to a great rough
draft, no matter what your process is, is remembering that you're trying to lay things in, in that order.
Book level, chapter level, paragraph level, sentence level, and not the other way around.
I wanted to show you how I draw. I know this is a seminar on writing, but stick with me for a second. All
right. Let's take a look at this here. Look at these steps. So I begin every one of my drawings or paintings
the same way. I do a little bit of prep work. I want to see the values. I want to see the general shapes. I
just want to get an idea of the project. I'm trying to make it seem more manageable by putting in just
the lights and the darks. I'm not looking at any details or anything. I'm just, I don't know, pulling form
from chaos. Then I move onto my actual piece of paper and I sketch things in very lightly. I'm just trying
to make sure that I can see where things are generally placed in this.
You'll notice I give quite a bit of attention to the focal point. This is like my mission statement. This is like
when I say I have to know what I intend to write, I have to know what I intend to paint. This is what I
want everything else to look like. I say, like this section right here. But I can't keep that up for long
otherwise things will get kind of weird if I focus too much, too fast, you end up with long spaghetti arms
or things that are in strange proportion. I need to keep on reminding myself of the bigger picture of
stepping back and looking at the way things are shaped overall.
Then I began to block stuff in and then on top of that, I started to finally do things in layers, bringing it all
up to the same level of finish. Then finally, I can go back to that first focal point and just really start
adjusting, bring it all together and ta da, final piece of art.
Now I'm showing you all of this because I want you to know this is also how I write a novel. Is this how
you're going to write a novel? No, probably not, but maybe similar, who knows. The reason why I create
my art like this and I write my novel like this is because my brain is wired to do abstract, to concrete in a
specific way and it works across media.
So if you have other parts of your life that you've learned how to problem solve very efficiently pay
attention to it because we're going to need it for the next video, which is all about, you need to make a
plan.
VIDEO 16:
One of the questions I often get asked as a published author when I go to events and I'm sitting on
panels is this one, are you a pantser or are you a plotter? Pantser, plotter? Pantser, plotter? Do you guys
know what these terms mean? Pantser stands for seat of your pantser, that's someone who just writes
spontaneously, and then plotter, even though it sounds like someone who's getting ready to commit a
crime, is actually someone who just does a lot of planning before they actually write their novel. Pantser
or plotter, they say. Pick a team. Which are you? Either, or?
I've actually known writers that exist on either end of that spectrum. I've known diehard pantsers that
just come up with an idea, open a blank manuscript, and then work out their problems on the page. And
God bless them. Likewise, I've known writers that have slaved for months and months to make a 50
page outline that they then write the novel from, and God bless them too. They both seem like they
need it. In reality though, most people fall somewhere in between those two extremes.
In a previous video, I showed you how I made art so that you could get an idea of what it looks like,
literally, for me to pull something abstract out of my head and make it concrete. I need a plan. I need to
know what I'm doing and I need to have some sense of the bigger picture, but I'm not going to be one of
those artists that creates detailed grids. It doesn't work with the way that I work. Moreover, I don't need
it for what I want to end up with. You have to come up with a plan that works for the way you move
through the world. If you can look at the rest of your life and see how you normally work successfully on
abstract problems, you can usually apply that general sense of things to your writing and find a plan that
works for you.
Now, for me, a couple of strategies that I use for making a plan, since I'm not a diehard detailed outliner
normally, is one of these. A summary, a synopsis, a plot point chart, a limited outline or a full outline.
These are all basically scaffolding options. These are the amount that I build out my plans and my
structure before I actually began hanging prose on top of it. That's fine.
Let's take a deeper dive into these scaffolding options. I'm going to show you examples of all of these
different forms. I've used various ones over the years, depending on how complicated the project is,
where I was in my writing career, or how much pre-work I'd done before them. Now, they might look
pretty small on your screen, especially if you are watching this video on your phone in a bathtub or
something, so you should know that all of these are reproduced in the supplementary PDF that comes
with all of your seminar supplies.
All right, so the first one we're going to look at is summaries. Summaries, I picked them as the first on
the list because they're the easiest. They're the softest way to introduce the idea of structure. It's you
basically telling yourself the story before you actually have to do any of the really heavy lifting. You can
actually see other examples of summaries on the back of novels in bookstores. It's actually a great way
to just jog your mind as to how you can write your own, to get into that summary writing voice. You can
pull them up on book buying websites and just look at how they are, well, summarized. The thing about
a summary that makes them great and makes them the easiest is that normally they introduce the
stakes and then, because they don't want to give away the rest of the book, they don't tell you the
ending. So you don't have to know the ending before you get into it. You don't have to know any of the
plot points along the way, just the things that you're excited about.
For instance, let's take a look at this summary that I wrote for Ballad, the second book in the Books of
Faerie series. Now, you can see it's just three paragraphs long. The first one tells us about Nuala. Nuala
is part muse, part psychic vampire. She's a faerie who whispers inspiration into great creative minds in
exchange for their vitality. While the freedom to sing or write or create is denied her, her mark across
history is unmistakable, a trail of brilliant poets, musicians, and artists who have died tragically young.
She has no sympathy for their abbreviated lifespans. Every 13 Halloweens, she burns in a bonfire and
rises from her ashes with no memory of what has come before, other than the knowledge of how her
end will come. Now, you'll notice this is actually just a paragraph that is telling me what I already know
as a creator about character. It's something I've already brainstormed. It doesn't tell you what's going to
happen with the setup, but it promises that there will be exciting things.
The next paragraph brings in some conflict. James is the best bagpiper in the state of Virginia, maybe in
the country. Plus, he's young and good-looking. Just Nuala's thing. But James, supremely confident in his
own abilities and in love with another girl, becomes the first to ever reject Nuala's offer. He's
preoccupied with bigger things than Nuala, an enigmatic horned figure who appears at dusk and the
downward spiral of Dee, his girlfriend who isn't. Now you see, this is me bringing in the other character
that I've brainstormed, an existing character from the first series. By putting these two paragraphs next
to each other, I can see how they're going to begin to conflict. I'm starting to tie them together. I'm
making it into a structure.
It becomes obvious to James that Nuala's presence, the horned king of the dead, and Dee's slow self-
destruction are all related, and that Dee is the center of a deadly faerie game. When James struggles to
unwind the tangled threads of the story, Nuala shadows him, seeing her conflicted, dual nature
reflected back at her in him. She finds herself lending him inspiration for nothing. Well, not quite for
nothing. For the hope of requited affection. But, even as James begins to realize his feelings for both
Dee and Nuala have changed, the thirteenth Halloween descends, with its bonfires and rituals for the
dead, one deadly to Nuala and the other to Dee. James can only save one. This third paragraph is full of
lies. Well, not lies, but total pretends. I have no idea what's happening here.
What faerie game? I have no concept. Oh, that was a king of the dead? Sure, that makes sense. Before,
it was just like an aesthetic move. That's cool. And then, oh right, I did say that she had 13 years, right? It
makes sense to end it on a 13, tie it together. Done. Summary. It gives me the illusion of having created
structure. It starts to suggest what story shape would be without me having to make logistical decisions
just yet. All right, let's take a look at another one. Let's take a look at Scorpio Races.
Now, you'll notice at the top of this it says Red as the Sea, because all of my novels go through 1 billion
working titles before they end up with their final titles. I'm actually terrible at writing titles. I don't know
why anybody lets me do it. Red as the Sea. All right, I'm perhaps not terrible at titles. Red as the Sea,
after all, is actually the title of The Scorpio Races in the German edition, although it sounds much sexier,
I think, in the German [German 00:07:22]. All right, moving on. Red as the Sea. The game, The Scorpio
Races. Now remember. Remember that the summary should look like it exists on the back of a book. I'm
trying to pump myself up, the imaginary reader. All right. The game, The Scorpio Races. The reward,
undreamed of riches, plus invincibility. The winner of the race is a hero, an idol, a God. In a world that is
both harsh and beautiful, this is important. The cost, your life. None of this tells me anything about the
story, but it made me feel like I was going to write something truly exciting.
All right. Every November, The Scorpio Races are run beneath the chalk cliffs of Skarmouth. Oh, that's an
interesting spelling of that word. Thousands of people gathered to watch the horses and the sea that
washes the blood from the sand. The mounts are [foreign language 00:08:11], the savage water horses
of faerie. There are no horses more beautiful, more fearless, or more deadly. The closer November
creeps, the more bloodthirsty the [foreign language 00:08:21] become. To race them is the most
glorious and vicious challenge there is, and the danger is part of the allure. Now, this is just world
building. This is all stuff that I knew beforehand, but I'm putting it into context. I'm setting up priorities.
Like I said, I'm looking for the shape of the story. I'm making a promise to myself. This is basically the
prose version of imagining what that book will be in your hands. Now I'm imagining what the book copy
will look like.
November 1st, the day of the races. The game becomes a war and the battle is to stay alive, to stay a
stride, to stay out of the water. Everyone knows what happens to the victims of the water horses.
They've seen the lungs and livers washed up on the shore. Sean Kendrick knows the dangers of the
[foreign language 00:09:05], he lost both his parents to them. He both loves and hates the savage horse
he's named Corr. In this world that is both dreamlike and nightmarish, magical and ordinary, Sean is
neither dead or alive. One foot in the ocean and one on land. He rides in the races to prove something
both to himself and to the horses. You see here that I'm trying to establish character motivations for it,
but you'll also notice if you've read The Scorpio Races, how this is right but it's also wrong. This is
identifiably Sean's art, but it's also sideways, through a mirror.
Ginger Connolly, that's obviously not what her name ended up being in the final book, when she became
Kate Connolly. Ginger Connolly trains for the races alongside Sean, but the horse she rides in the races is
not one of the brutal [foreign language 00:09:54]. It's an ordinary little mare, like ginger is an ordinary
girl. The only thing that makes Ginger and her mare any different is heart, and that's something they've
both got in spades. Sean thinks it's suicide. He thinks she has no place on the beach. He thinks he knows
her. He doesn't. They both came to the races hoping to change their lives. But first, they'll have to
survive. Dun, dun, duh.
Now, you'll notice the thing that both of these summaries do is that they really skate around all plot
points. Often, I'll write a summary before I do anything else as far as structure, because it's like I'm
telling myself the story. I'm working out the problems for the first time in short form. I know that if I do
it in the book I'll get tangled immediately, but there's something very manageable about doing it in just
a page. The summary, I don't care if it's not quite right, it can be a funny laugh later when people say is
that really what you thought the book was going to about? Kind of. Sort of. At the time, it made sense.
Summaries, they're a great tool. My first step.
Let's talk about the next, more complicated version of scaffolding, the dreaded synopsis. Synopses are
terrible for many reasons. For starters, I don't understand why they should still maintain that whole
synopsis for a singular synopses for plural. They should just get over themselves and be synopsises.
That's fine. Synopses. Synopses are terrible because they tell you everything. They spoil the ending. They
ask you at a very early stage of the game to just dryly describe everything that happens. Now, if you do
pull off this perfect synopsis, if you are great at writing a synopsis, this will actually serve you later in the
game because you'll need to pull out that synopsis when you're querying agents and editors. They'll
often ask for a query, which is just a one page description, a pitch, and then they'll sometimes ask for a
synopsis, which is a three to five page-ish description of everything that happens in your book, spoiling
everything. Just dryly putting it out there. And then, if you pass that test, like a fairy tale, they will then
ask to see the rest of your manuscript. Yeah, synopses.
Now, in the old days, I used to use a very regimented kind of synopsis to write my books. I would do the
real thing like you would send to an agent or a publisher. I would try and build from that summary to an
actual plot, making decisions along the way, trying to make it all lead up into an end. The thing about
the synopses, I would make myself write them, two page at least, before I would go onto the manuscript
itself, is that they would quickly turn into lies. It was difficult to work out the actual solutions to the plot
as I was writing it in order, and I couldn't quite figure it out. Let me show you one of the old synopses for
Ballad.
Now, you saw that summary that I just showed you for Ballad. That summary, you can see, actually went
alongside this synopses, which I believe happened beforehand and then I scratched it after I was angry
with the synopses and wrote another summary and another synopses. Which, I have to admit, I dug
through my computer trying to find the synopses/synopsis. You see, I told you. The grammar. Trying to
find the synopsis that followed that first summary, and, who knows? It's in a pile of Word documents. All
right, so, you can see how this synopsis is far more detailed than the summary. This is only the first page
of it, I think it's five pages long. See, it has a summary. It tells you who the protagonists are, the points of
view. It looks like James, Deirdre, and Thomas Rhymer. That's exciting. I forgot about that. Then you can
see how it sets it up and then goes chapter by chapter, and includes words that might even appear in
the novel.
The only problem with this is, like I said, I would start out strong and then I would add more details, but
because I didn't actually know those details, I was making logistical decisions on the fly, I would quickly
end up in a place where the aliens would come down and kill everyone only in the space of three to five
pages. A miracle, really, of efficiency. All right, let's take a look at what I do now when I am writing a
synopsis, because it's still valuable for me to spoil the end, or at least try to spoil the end now. Only, I
don't bother trying to autofill all of these details because I know they're going to be lies. All right, let's
take a look at the synopsis that I wrote for myself for All the Crooked Saints.
You'll see here that it starts out with the setting. It tells you what the conflict is. Let's see. People come
to the Soria family to make their darkness visible. Once they see it, those people can deal with it. The
Sorias don't interfere after this point because there's taboo. Setting up the rules of the magic. First
miracle is to make the darkness visible. Second miracle is to make it go away for good. You'll notice I'm
not bothering with any prettiness of prose here. I'm not trying to confess/convince. No. We're going to
do the second one talking about this summary. All right, first of all, I want you to look at the difference
between the last synopsis and this one. The last synopsis, who was I trying to convince? It looked like I
was definitely trying to show someone that I could really write a synopsis. This one, who knows? Are
these even full sentences? We have no idea. It's so ugly. Is that in cell phone text? Did I write this on a
cell phone? Anyway, here we go.
You see that at the beginning, I describe what the magic is. I'm clearly jotting this down so that I
remember. People come to see the family to make their darkness visible. Talks about the taboo. First
miracle is to make the darkness visible. Second miracle is to make it go away for good. So they have a
priest there with a coyote's head, for instance. And it's just going to be that way until he stops thinking
girls are hot. Anyway, the taboo is that if the Sorias interfere, they will bring darkness upon themselves,
and theirs is a scarier brand. Backstory. Thanks, Maggie. That's great. We'll work it out later. Opposition
with Loyola, who's now named Beatriz is because there is her and another cousin, Daniel. He's the saint.
Even though Beatriz can do what he does, he's the one who likes it. It's mystical and spiritual and
religious to hi, and he looks wild and saintly. There's no punctuation here.
Now, notice I'm telling myself the things that I need to know. I'm basically writing down and making
explicit all of the things that I've thought about in my process. So, we've got the setting. We've got the
rules of the magic. We have the central character debate right there. You've got Daniel being the holy
one and Beatriz being the one who does not want to be the saint. All right, here we go. And this is fine.
People come to him. Money comes into Bicho Raro because of this. Then a girl comes and he falls in love
with her. She doesn't get her shit together, however, and she disappears into the desert in the night.
Also, before she does, he interferes because he loves her and wants her to be better. By the way, this
doesn't happen. She does not go into the desert. But still, this is less of a lie than the previous one.
No one knows this until after because he goes blind. Beatriz has been spending her days in the box
truck, broadcasting with her vainglorious other cousin who fancies himself a Mexican Diablo Elvis DJ.
That is a hell of a phrase. I wish there was a period. Anyway, but now, if Daniel dies, and he might
because Soria darkness is terrible, she will have to be the saint. So, you see, the crux of it then is then
brought home. We saw what she worried about, which is that she would have to be forced into
responsibility, and that he wanted to be a good saint. Now you see that we've switched the world
around. Daniel has broken the rules, been a bad saint, and Beatriz looks like she is going to be forced to
be the saint. Conflict. She does not remotely want to be the saint because, although she finds the
darkness in their ability interesting, she thinks it is science and should be studied instead of worshiped,
which of course goes against the non-interference thing. So, she is motivated to fix Daniel because she
does not want to be the saint. Good. Great character.
Anyway, so Pete has arrived. I like the way there's literally no context. This document is only for me.
Pete, this random guy, Pete has arrived or arrives at the beginning and he is there to earn the box truck
which Beatriz is using for her radio station. Here we have a bit more conflict. Obviously, I've given Pete
some thought when I developed him. I want him to be her love interest, but also in dissonance with
Beatriz. Obviously, Beatriz does not really think much of this, as they need the truck to properly evade
the FCC. Oh, I forgot there was this whole subplot of the FCC chasing them around. Blah, blah, blah.
They fall in love however, because it turns out that INTP's like INFJ's a lot. I was really into the whole
personality thing when I wrote this book. One of my best friends is an INTP and I really wanted to write
her into a book. Anyway, there we go.
Daniel gets worse. The cousins make the decision to broadcast for the girl across the desert because if
they can find her, surely Daniel will get better. By broadcasting for him though, they're interfering. So
now they've brought down all this darkness on themselves. Climax with the FCC, who is actually full of
darkness, which is why he was so committed to following them. I really had completely forgotten about
this idea of some government agent who is chasing them. Anyway, all right. So, Pete, thinking Beatriz
just really doesn't care about him, so he leaves and some darkness stuff. Yeah, this is a fantastic
document. But, those of you who have read All the Crooked Saints will see that it actually cleaves pretty
closely to what happens in the book. As I worked this out, just talking through my character dynamics,
looking at what would actually cause peaks and valleys in their storylines, it naturally leads me to a place
where I can kind of fake a climax that for, I can't believe I said that in a seminar for children, that actually
will get me to a place that is quite like the end of the novel itself.
Plot point chart. This is not truly a scaffolding method that I use at this stage. It's a worksheet that I use
as a step to the next one, which is limited outline. Now, I do love the snot out of these in the revision
process, and I'm going to show you, I think, later, in one of the way further videos on the third act, how I
actually plug in a whole bunch of scenes into one of these scene outlines, a plot point chart, to help me
make things more shapely at the end of the draft. But right now, I'm really just looking for various
anchor points that I can use. I'm trying to, again, in my head, imagine that natural rise and fall of a three
act structure. Let's take a look so we can see what I'm talking about.
You'll notice here that I actually have it down as four acts, but that's really just fun and games. Act two
and three are still just act two, but because act two is often longer than the rest, some people will split
them right down the center. So, ignore that line. Pretend it's three acts across the middle. Now, check
out how I fill in these boxes. It tells me where in the acts each of these scenes take place, generally
speaking. Act one, chapter one. Prologue, establishing image. This is me saying remember you have to
set the mood for the book. What I'm doing here is that I'm trying to think of how I'm going to promise
the book that is to come. Chapter two, set up. Again, I'm establishing normal. I know then that at the
end of that act I'm going to break the world and start the quest, and you can see in act two it's called fun
and games. I usually don't come up with fun and games unless I already have a good idea for some mirth
or some challenges in there. I might plug them in, but I end up moving things around in act two more
than any other act.
You'll notice that things get exciting after that midpoint. At the mid point, the turn for the worse, things
are not what they seem. Shit's getting real. All is lost. Dark night of the soul, when everything goes
terribly wrong. Solution found. The hero faces the biggest fear or biggest hurdle. Action stuff. And then
the final image, which usually mirrors the first one. So, all of these, and we'll talk more about three act
structure a little later in this video, these are usually things that in my brainstorming I've got kind of my
idea of what these scenes might look like and I start to write them in there to see if I can just divine a
shape, start to see escalating conflict fall into place. Because I'll need these for when I write the next
thing, which is the limited outline.
Now we get to the version of scaffolding that I use more often than almost anything else at this stage,
the limited outline. The limited outline is the writing version of that very detailed hawk head that you
saw in my drawing in the previous one. What I'm looking for is I'm looking for enough scaffolding to see
the road ahead of me but not a whole lot further. I'll have filled out one of those plot point charts or I'll
have done one of those synopses like I did for All the Crooked Saints, so I'll kind of know where I'm
headed to in the greater sense of things, but then I'll do a more detailed outline for the first couple of
chapters. The idea is that I'm building out a scaffolding and I climb and climb and climb, and then I
pause. I look around, I make sure that I'm happy with what I've done down here, that I've established
my mission statement, that I know the book that I'm writing. And then I take a pause and I build out my
scaffolding some more. And I'll rinse and repeat throughout the entire book. Write a little bit more,
build out some more scaffolding. Write a little bit more, build out some more scaffolding. I'm going to
show you an example of this for Forever, the third book in the Shiver trilogy. If you haven't read it, it
probably doesn't matter. It's a really weird little thing.
All right, here we go. All right, you can see here that I have my chapters all lined up. It's pretty detailed,
because at this point I've done the work. I've done that plot point chart, so it's no longer as fakey. I kind
of know the beginning, That establishing image. I know that I'm going to establish normal. I know that I
am going to break the world at the end of the act. And I can kind of autofill in between that and make
that my plan for jumping in. So, you can see, I've put my point of view character there to make sure that
I'm not doing a huge block of one point of view, since, remember, in the Shiver trilogy it's four cycling
first person points of view and I'm trying to keep all of those stories moving together so they're creating
one narrative.
Now, what do I want to point out in this? Catch that some of these have little bits of dialogue in them.
This is just things that I was doing to remind myself as I was brainstorming, picturing what that scene
would look like, that chapter six, that begins with so now I was a werewolf and a thief, I knew as soon as
I had that line that I had the mood of that chapter. So, it's shorthand. Like I said, all of these early
documents are for you, not for the reader. Yes, you are eventually creating the novel for the reader, but
these are things which are just your chicken scratch in the corner of the paper. They only have to make
sense for you. Unlike that original synopsis for ballad, that was so attractive and looked like it should be
headed off to an editor or a agent somewhere and was absolutely useless. No, I do just what I need. And
I don't worry if later when I go back that I have mudhole; Sam remembers Shelby torture and finds
Grace and no one else has a clue what that means. I know what it means, and that's all that matters.
Now, I want to talk about a version of scaffolding that I almost never use, and that is the full outline. It's
the extreme. It's the opposite of the pantser. It's the plotter. This is a detailed outline that is even more
involved than a synopsis. It builds out everything that happens chapter by chapter, blow by blow, and
then you simply prose it out, basically, because you've worked out all of the structure. Here's the thing
about a full outline. Gosh, I hate doing them. I hate doing them so much. It feels soulless. It takes away
all of the fun of it. One of the things that I love about writing is that feeling of discovery that comes
when things click together. It's almost like you get to read and write your book at the same time. It's a
guilty pleasure, an indulgence. Yes, storytelling. Experiencing it and doing it at the same time. Fantastic.
Now, that said, when I do a full outline, I take all of that away because I take away all of the mistakes,
basically. I'm taking out all of the slippery, emotional bits and instead replacing it with just the sheer
logic of getting it done. Now, I hate doing this, but I'm about to show you one that I did for a very
specific reason. And it's not the only one I've done. It is for my upcoming graphic novel. It's coming out
this fall. It's a retelling of Swamp Thing. Let's take a look.
All right, here it is. The reason why I had to do a full outline for Swamp Thing is because when you're
writing a project that's with someone else's intellectual property, like in this case I was writing for DC
comics, they want you to actually do your job and to prove that you can do your job beforehand. They
need to sign off on every story decision before you're ready to go and dive into it. Moreover, this was a
graphic novel, which means that I wasn't really fully finishing it up with prose. Instead, this script would
eventually, when finished, be handed over to an artist who would create my vision on paper. That
meant that everything had to be detailed and perfect and slotted into place long before the draft was
ever completed.
So, you'll see, this is a very official document. At the top, we've got the title. My name. We've got the
themes. We have a summary which tells us the central conflict of the characters. It's grounding the
person who's reading this outline, but also it proves to me I can't write this and ground this editor unless
I also know these things. All right, so, this is the first page. Next page, you can see the outline itself.
There's act one, prologue. You can see that this goes line by line. Says where every scene happens. It
tells you a lot of the dialogue that happens in it. It's in all caps because it's a graphic novel. It tells you
what each page looks like. And I can tell you that this went on for the entire manuscript and describe the
entire thing.
Now, the problem with me and full outlines is that, I have to tell you, I write fantastically to full outlines.
If I make myself do this amount of work, the speed with which I can write a draft is absolutely incredible
because I've worked out all of the solutions first. But, here's the other thing about full outlines. I hate
writing them. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. It takes away everything I love about writing and gives me
only the parts that I hate. And then I have to wait until I get to the end of this, which is weeks and weeks
and weeks. I mean, it takes me a good chunk of writing time to solve all of these problems and make it
into a structure. It takes me all of those weeks of hating things, and then finally I get to be turned loose
and free and I get to do the things that I love. But only after suffering. And I just won't do it. You know
why? Because I don't like it.
I end up with the same quality of product either way and I would rather muddle my way and turn down
dark corners and experience the happy accidents and clean them up again that comes from writing a
summary, a synopsis, and a limited outline than I would actually going through the drudgery. Because,
you know what? When I write it with a summary, the synopsis, and a limited outline, I love writing. I
mean, sometimes it's frustrating, but I love it. It's a game. If I do it like this, it's work. I'm telling you this
because there are many different ways that will work for you. There are many different ways that will
not work for you. There are many hybrid ways that will get you part of the way there and then turn you
down a dead end. The right version not only gets you to the book that you want to write, but it also gets
you there in a way that you enjoy doing, that you're going to stick to it, and not instead give up halfway
and have the aliens come down and kill everyone.
VIDEO 17:
Three-act structure. Three-act structure. Three-act structure. I don't know why I said it three times apart
from the fact that there's the word three at the front of it and it felt important.
I'm going to talk to you briefly about three-act structure now, but as I said before, if you want to know
more about it after this video, there are courses, books, handbooks, guides and religions to three-act
structure. There are people that will take apart each of those acts and they will chart each of the points
mathematically, the perfection of it, the dizzying intellect will blow your mind. Especially if you're a full
outliner, if you're one of those diehard plotters, you might enjoy that.
For me, I'm interested in three-act structure insofar as it's the default. No; more than that, because I
know that I said that it was the default, that it was invisible to readers, that most western readers
expected a novel to be in three-act structure, I'm interested in it insofar as it's the organic expression of
story, of beginning, middle and end. I know to many, it might seem formulaic, but to me it feels like the
very logical kind of breathing pattern that comes from a structure, which is something happens to us, we
react to it and we're changed. That's to me, the heart of three-act structure.
Now let's take a look at a chart now, and I'm going to talk through every single one of these acts so that
you can see what three-act structure means to me.
Oh my gosh, do not make fun of my graphic here. Graphic design is my passion. I lost the cord to
connect my tablet to my computer, and so this is a mouse drawing. It's so bad. All right, here we go. You
see that we have a little stick figure drawing of three-act structure. Do you see the little divisions there?
One, two, and three. Look at those wonky little arrows. They're trying so hard.
All right. Let's talk about what these acts mean. I said earlier in the seminar that a shorthand for three-
act structure was that the old fashioned advice of act one, put your character up a tree, act two, throw
stones at him, act three, get him down gracefully. I said before I thought that was pretty oversimplified
and not useful for exploration, so let's talk it out more fully.
All right. Act one: The job of act one is to establish normal. That's the very first thing that you do. You
show the world as it is. Our protagonist is [inaudible 00:02:41] along in it just fine. There's something
we've written into our protagonist. They need to change in some way. We intend for them to be a
different person at the end and at the beginning. Right now they have no idea. They're blissfully aware.
They're wandering around being flawed, et cetera, et cetera, until we see part way through act one we
break the world. Notice we do not break the character necessarily, but we definitely break the world.
This is where all of the 24 year olds disappear or something, or the aliens come down. Yeah, we break
the world.
This moment of external change drives the character to act. Now the character normally would not be
acting probably; they'd just be continuing on in normal, but now they are spurred into an action. It's an
unsophisticated action. It's a juvenile action. It doesn't necessarily have to be that the character is
childish; it's just that it's a less sophisticated, developed, evolved version of whatever their
consequences will be at the end of the book. This is just them acting out.
So for instance, this is where Katniss suddenly decides to volunteer for the Hunger Games. This is where
Puck suddenly decides that she's angry at her brothers and she volunteers for the Scorpio races. This is
quest time. They are driven into action. Off they go. The adventure has begun.
Now act two is called in Hollywood, the fun and games act, which is a name I like quite a bit because it
explores, well exploration. Instead of just conflict, it's not just about stones, also it could be about
capers, heists, anything that's fun. Really act two is designed to have an increasing number of challenges
thrown at the protagonist and the protagonist driving themselves into these increasing challenges in the
search of their goal.
Now, somewhere along here, usually they start to get a more active goal. They can be passive until, I
don't know, halfway. They need to start switching gears, especially because right there dead center
midpoint, we get new information. That's where you find out that your best friend is a spy or the bad
guys have more information or more weapons than you thought they did. Or you find out that I don't
know, your best friend and roommate is a skeleton in the woods or something like that, and it
completely changes the game. Suddenly the stakes are put into a whole new light and for the rest of the
act, those fun and games become darker fun and games, and the stakes get higher and higher.
Now, usually we think that the protagonist is doing well during the second act. They're getting harder
and harder things thrown at them and they're plunging into harder and harder challenges, but they're
doing pretty well at it. It seems like they're going to succeed at whatever it is they're doing until all of a
sudden we have the darkest moment. They try their hardest at their worst challenge yet, and everything
fails. The best friend dies, or maybe a friend disappears in search of a magical forest against everyone
else's wills. Whatever this is, this is where all seems lost and it will never be regained again.
However, in this dark moment, our protagonist uses everything they have learned over the course of the
second act and they find a solution which drives them into the climax. They throw themselves against
the bad guy. And then there's a moment in act three, where we get to face our big, bad emotions. They
get to look at the hurdle that they were hoping to never overcome, or they find themselves facing the
thing that in act one, they thought they could never face. This moment is often a mirror of that kind of
juvenile unsophisticated decision they make an act one. Only this time when they are face to face with it
in the climax having learned everything that they have learned in the second act and being a better
person for it, or more interesting or a darker one, if this is an antihero kind of situation, they act in a
new and incredibly interesting way based upon that. And that propels them to the very end of the
conflict.
Y'all notice that these little wobbly arrows here, they're in Christmas colors, I guess, represent those
internal and external arcs that I was talking about way back when. You'll notice that the internal arc, the
passive one, the character conflict is starting at the beginning and then it ends with that big, bad,
emotional moment. And once they have won that internal arc, that gives them the power they need to
pull off that external arc. And as long as you don't reverse those two arrows, your story is going to feel
commercial. It's going to feel active. Now, if you reverse those and had the character moment go on the
outside, external arc finishes up beforehand, it's going to feel lopsided and more passive.
Now formulaic, like I said, I don't think so. To me, this looks like the natural progression, the natural
breathing patterns of beginning, middle, and end. Something happens, we rise to meet it and it changes
us.
How much will the reader actually be aware of three-act structure? That very much depends on genre
and tone. Generally speaking, the more the reader can see the bones of that three-act structure, the
faster the book is going to feel. This is because it functions much the same as that presentation style. I'm
going to talk about A, B and C you say, and then here's A, B and C, and I've talked about A, B and C. If
you follow three-act structure so that the reader could really tell where in that pattern they are, they'll
be able to guess how fast the rollercoaster is going to head down towards the climax. And alternatively,
the problem with that is that if you don't execute three-act structure, well, they will start to feel lumpy
as they go along the way.
Now you don't always want readers to be fully aware of that three-act structure driving through the
plot. If you're doing a fast paced thriller, yes. Make them careen through there. If you want them to
have a slower, more dreamy experience though, you can hide the bones with character moments and
noise and pros, which is what I did in the Raven cycle. Yes, I wanted the three-act structure there so that
readers would feel grounded, so they had a sense of movement, but I also didn't want them to careen
through those books. I wanted those books to invade them, to really get inside their skin and live there
for a while. I wanted them to luxuriate in the dreamlike sense of them.
So three-act structure beneath it all, but noise over the top of it. If you want them to go faster, strip
away that noise and make sure that people in particular see those big points we talked about. You want
them to see the world break. You want them to see them break into the quest. You want the midpoint
to be huge. You want the darkest moment to really stand out and then you want that climax
rollercoaster to be clearly signaled; genre and tone.
VIDEO 18:
Picture the scene. You're in a movie theater. It's dark. The silence is hushed and anticipatory. The movie
is about to begin. Here comes the music. It's tense, setting the tone. The lights come up on the screen
and we see the action at hand. A character we've never met before is running for their life across a field.
They're looking over their shoulder. We can see the tension in their face, looking over their shoulder.
And now we see that something is chasing them. What is it? Dogs? No, it's creatures. And behind those
creatures, what are they? It's people, driving the creatures. Will this character we've never met before
make it to the other side of the field, to the safety of the trees? We don't know. The music tells us it's
going to be close. They trip. Cut to black. Title of the movie, in we go.
Start with a bang. This is advice that a lot of writers have been given over the years. Start with a bang,
start in the action, start when it gets good, start when your story starts. Remember, it has to be thrilling,
it needs to be a hook, it needs to be pacey at the very beginning. I have mixed feelings about this. In
2020, we're all consumers of many different kinds of media. We're consumers of movies, which are
long-form visual media. We're consumers of TV, which can be episodic short-form visual media. We read
graphic novels, which are shorter stories that are told through visuals and through words. We read
novels. We read short stories. We watch YouTube clips. We take on web comics. We bring in all of these
different formats, and they are all influencing each other in their structure.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's both. It's both. We can learn a lot from other formats.
However, there's no point in trying to be another format. Don't get me wrong. I love TV and I love film,
but a visual format is never going to work the same as a prose format. There's no point making your
book ape a movie structure. I bring this up now because this is generally the juncture when I have to
fight against all of the bad habits that I have learned from watching TV and film. Beginning a novel,
structuring a novel, often I'll find myself, even though I know better, still reaching for those old
conventions which are movie wisdom, TV wisdom, but the truth is that movie and books, they both have
things that they're good at and things that they're bad at.
And when someone says that a movie feels like a book, that does not mean that they've printed words
on the page. Likewise, when someone says that a book feels cinematic, it doesn't mean that you are
literally writing your book, word for word, scene for scene, like a movie. When you say that a movie is
like a book, really it's indicating a level of backstory and detail. If you say that a book is like a movie, it's
talking about how you can see it in your head, but the tools and tricks for that are completely different
than what you would use in an actual book or a movie. Now, it's important to remember that there are
things that movies do that we can't, and vice versa.
Here are some things that movies can do. They can start with a bang, in action. They can head hop
between different characters, they can leap from one point of view, to another point of view. They can
have entire scenes where the interest is entirely that the character is walking through a scene, talking to
another talking head. And these are movie conventions that we will accept. All of these things don't
work as effectively in books. Now here's things that books can do that movies can't. They can set a tone
effortlessly with prose. They can establish huge amounts of backstory in just a very small amount of
space. And they can offer us a perfect and accurate and intimate view of a character's internal landscape
without guessing whatsoever. Now I'm bringing this up now, because we're going to start talking about
framing beginnings. And I want you to remember that we're not going to start with a bang. Instead,
we're going to start with a question. We're going to start with curiosity.
"Okay Maggie," you say, "so we're not supposed to start with a bang. So how are we supposed to start
then?" Look, I'm not telling you, for starters, that starting with a bang is necessarily wrong. I'm just
telling you that there's something that film can do as far as starting with a bang that's harder to do in
writing, which is this. When you start with a bang, when you start in the middle of an action scene with a
character the reader has never met, you have to remember your reader has no emotional connection to
that moment whatsoever. They don't really care whether or not that character running lives or dies,
because guess what? They're a stranger to them. They don't know if they like them or not like them. Are
they a villain? And are they a hero? We don't know. So the only reason why a reader or a viewer is
drawn in by that action scene is to explore the world, to understand the tone, to maybe get a hint of
what the stakes are going to be later, the film or whatever is promising we're going to get here
eventually, we're going to ratchet it up to this level. This is the level of intensity that you can expect to
rise to at some point, no matter how much we bring it down later.
The reason why this works so effectively in film is because you can do it very efficiently. You can show
someone an exciting world, and it doesn't take very much of the viewers time at all. Words are
inefficient in comparison to that. You are dragging folks through actual blocks of text on a page and
asking them to be invested, even though they have no idea who these characters are. So unless this
opening, this start with a bang, is actually doing more work than simply showing you the bang, it's going
to lose the reader. They're going to skip that and hopefully go to wherever this book actually starts.
That's the reason why there's this advice that says you shouldn't have prologues. It's untrue. You just
shouldn't have prologues that don't do enough work. What you need to do is promise the book that you
are going to write. And that means that, if you're not immediately giving them an emotional attachment
to a character, you've got to be giving them literally everything else. Mood, setting, promising the
stakes, and keep it brief.
Start with curiosity, rather than starting with a bang. Start with something that's interesting. Start with
something that is specific. Start with something which asks a question. A great opening for a novel is one
which is the metaphorical version, in prose, of a wardrobe in an old English mansion. You open the door,
and beyond the coats you see a glimpse of what seems to be something which is not the back of the
wardrobe, but rather it's another world. In your opening, you don't explain what the other world is, you
don't contextualize it, you don't go on and on about the coats. All you do is you open that door a crack,
and readers get the intriguing glimpse of what they're headed to in the future. Start with a question,
start with curiosity, start with a promise of where you're headed. And that is a great opening.
Now it's important to note that a great way to open a book is with specificity. Specificity of character,
specificity of setting, specificity of knowledge. But it's also important to know that when you're doing
this number, writing what you know, that you should treat your interests in your book in the same way
that you would treat writing yourself into a book. Now, I highly recommend writing in your specialized
knowledge, because after all, you know about things in your life better than anyone else will. You are an
expert on something, and you can offer interesting specificity into that. And readers do like specificity.
However, there's ways to novelize specificity of knowledge, and there's ways to lecture on specificity of
knowledge. It's important to learn to contextualize your interests.
I follow a lot of science writers on Twitter, and I read a lot of science writing, and there is a very big
difference between someone who is interested in science and knowledgeable about science, who writes
about something scientific, and a scientific paper. One of these things has been prepared for the public,
and the other one has been prepared for peers. It's important for you to know that you're not lecturing
the reader on things that you know, nor are you lecturing the reader on things you've experienced, nor
are you lecturing the reader on things that you've researched. There's no place at the beginning of your
novel for a massive description of this town, which you have done every single bit of research on, and
discovered all of its history. You need to learn to tell it as a story, which means you need to know what it
looks like from the outside.
I'll give an example. I'm a bagpiper, as I have mentioned a few times before, which means I know a lot
about bagpiping. I probably know more about bagpiping than most of you guys, which again, makes me
the expert. Does that make me the best person to write a novel on bagpiping? Not necessarily. Because
the truth is, unless I step outside myself and think about my reader, I am not going to translate the
experience of bagpiping into a way that's interesting to them. It's difficult without stepping outside
yourself to say, "Is this a part that's boring? Is this a part that's confusing? Is this a part that needs me to
compare it to something else in order to make it make sense?" But someone else coming from the
outside would look at it and be able to ask the questions that the average reader would and research
them. So it's important when you're putting specificity of your own knowledge into an opening that
you're remembering it every step of the way, to contextualize it.
Another example of this is comparing my early Faerie books with The Scorpio Races. Now, I believe that I
should get better with every single novel that I've written. And one of the ways that I think I've gotten
better is keeping in mind that reader, and keeping in mind my specificity of experience and knowledge.
So in those early books, they're full of Celtic music and Celtic folklore, and I'm really into those things.
I'm also really into faerie legends. Ever since I was a kid, I used to just check out every single book in the
library and read everything about folklore and tradition. So it was natural to me. That was what I'd
grown up in, and it just made sense. So I placed those things into those very books, with very little
context, just threw out faerie rules, I just threw in Celtic music, I threw in all of these interesting Celtic
traditions without thinking about my reader a whole lot. Now, those books are well liked by people who
also grew up in those same traditions. However, they're not very commercial. They'd be more
commercial if I found a way to actually make that folklore accessible to readers who had not grown up
with it.
Fast forward to The Scorpio Races. The Scorpio Races is all about a Celtic legend, those Celtic water
horses that come out of the ocean and eat people. You can't get any more hardcore Celtic traditional
legend than that. However, at every step of the way, I'm thinking about how it looks from the outside if
you have not grown up with faerie lore. I never use the words faerie, I think, in that entire book. Instead
I have made it so that it can be emotionally accessible to those who have not grown up in that tradition.
I read a thing a long time ago about the way that we bring in music as children. This study said that they
found that people regarded music as music if they had heard that genre before a certain age, it was five
or something, and it wasn't even a genre of music. They were talking about a scale of music, traditions
of music, that if you grew up listening to oldies music, or classical music, that you attached an emotional
meaning to it. It would truly stir your feelings. However, they said that it was more likely that if you
hadn't grown up with a very specific tradition like jazz or something like that, that when you came to it
as an adult, you often had an academic appreciation of it, but it did not stir the heart in the same way.
I try and keep that in mind, as a musician and a writer, because obviously I grew up with both Celtic
tradition and Celtic music, but I'm mindful that as I'm jamming away to a reel that I grew up with, that
unless it has some outside influence thrown on it, I'm not going to recommend it wholesale to someone
who hasn't grown up with it. I'm not going to expect them to have the same emotional response. This is
a very long way of saying that, yes, throw in these things into your openings. Write what you know. But
remember, this is when we start to think about our reader. You're contextualizing it for them.
One of the things that your opening will need to do is draw your reader into your character. And as
we've mentioned before, this is a tall order, because your character is a stranger. They begin with no
emotional connection whatsoever. They're not on their side. They're not against them, but they don't
know who they are. So how do we make characters sympathetic? Well, first of all, let's ask if that's even
what we need. Sometimes we don't need our characters to be sympathetic. Most of all, we need our
characters to be interesting. Sympathy is a bonus side effect, but really what draws us through a book is
if a character is interesting. Characters are interesting when they're competent, when they're ambitious,
when they're surprising, when they have interesting quests or goals, when they're funny. They don't
have to be all of these things, but any of these things will make us get more onto a character's side.
We'll turn the page to see what is happening next.
Now, making characters sympathetic on the other hand, getting the reader on the side of your
character, there are a lot of fake ways to do that. Making your character a goody two shoes, making
them kind to kids and animals, making them extremely loyal. Yeah. The thing about making characters
too good is that we hate characters that are too good. We have a name for them, right? Mary Sues, or
Gary Stus. I don't know. This is a very gender binary sort of way. Is there a non-binary name for a
character that's too perfect? I'm thinking of characters that know how to do everything, they never lose
their temper, they're always very evolved. They travel through the plot with grace and poise and
generosity of spirit. They always call their mother. And so, of course we should want them to survive,
right? No, we don't want them to survive. We don't care about them. They're paper dolls with smiley
faces drawn on both sides.
I remember that I had this problem when I was originally writing The Raven Cycle. Through multiple
drafts, I'd brought up my character group of the friends to move through the quest. However, I was
having a ton of problems with Gansey. Gansey was ... he was fine. He was great. I mean, he had a pretty
good relationship with his friends and his family. He wanted what was best for them. He was a world
traveler, he was very good at it. He was learned. He wanted his friends to do well in school. All of these
things should seem vaguely familiar to the Gansey character type, if you've read The Raven Cycle, but
there was something just treacly about him.
And then I watched a movie, and I'm going to sound like I hated this movie, and I didn't hate it. And I'm
going to sound like I'm making fun of it, and I'm not making fun of it. You might think this is a great
movie, but for me it really drove home what was wrong with Gansey. The movie was Tintin. The new
one, the animated one. It's pretty attractive as far as animated films go. Tintin is an adventurer, he's a
young buck, he's always on the look out for adventure. He's perfect. He's absolutely perfect. I see no
evidence that he has ever been troubled by anything other than maybe injustice, possibly, in the world.
And then he responds to even that in a measured and useful way. Oh my gosh. It was like watching paint
drying. I had no idea why I was getting to the end of that movie. The only thing pulling me through was
the mystery itself, because what did Tintin have to lose? His cool? No evidence of that. Yeah. What were
the interpersonal stakes? He didn't seem at all fleshed out and real.
And then I realized the problem with Gansey was that he was too perfect. Not perfect in the sense that
he was amazing, but he just didn't have any edges. There was no inherent dissonant in him. He had
become a Mary Sue. Because it's not necessarily that a character can do everything that makes them a
Mary Sue. It's not even about that uncomfortable feeling when you're watching a movie or reading a
book and you feel like the character is wish fulfillment for the writer, it wasn't even that. He was just a
blank slate with a face projected onto him.
Real perfect characters, who are actually written to be perfect in every way, we find them hilarious.
They're played for laughs. Like Gilroy Lockhart in the Harry Potter series is a perfect character. And you
would ever look at him and think, "Oh, he's boring," or, "He's too perfect in a way that's a Mary Sue."
Instead, he's hilarious in that he's supposed to be perfect. Of course, later there's complications, but
still, actual perfection printed onto a character doesn't read as Mary Sue. No, it's a blankness. It's an
inability to engage with the complicated ways that characters get to where they have been in their life
that makes a character into a Mary Sue or Gary Stu. And it has the opposite effect of making them
sympathetic. No, we would rather be on the side of someone deeply flawed and terrible than we would
somebody who just seems to do the right thing all the time.
We've talked perfect characters, let's talk imperfect characters. How imperfect can your character be,
and the reader still be on their side? I remember that I had written the first novel in The Raven Cycle,
and the second novel was getting ready to come out. And one of my writer friends said, "Maggie, you
are a genius." And I replied, "Why, thank you for noticing. What did I do?" And this other author said,
"Well, it's amazing how you made Ronan sympathetic with just that one move. I mean, it's just so ... the
one stroke of your pen, and he could do basically anything and gosh, we'd be on his side. It's just
unbelievable. I saw that and I just put the book to my chest and I thought, 'Gosh, how does she do it?
She's a genius.'"
I was nodding and going, "Yeah, a genius. That's what I am. That one stroke of my pen when I made
Ronan Lynch sympathetic. Right." What was the one stroke of my pen? She said, "The bird, when you
gave him the bird." Right? Right, right. The truth was that there was no genius driving that moment. No
conscious genius driving that moment. But the principle behind it is true, is genius, and feel free to steal
it, which is this. Ronan Lynch, as a character in The Raven Cycle, is meant to be abrasive. We see him
constantly doing things which hurt his friends, annoy his friends, sabotage himself, and just generally
making him an unpleasant human to be around. He spends most of The Raven Boys just being absolutely
awful in every way possible. However, part way through the book, he does indeed adopt a baby Raven,
which has to be fed every two hours. He continues being horrible in almost every single way, and yet he
stops every two hours and feeds this baby bird, which does indeed have the effect of giving us sympathy
for Ronan Lynch.
I've discovered that you can make a character truly, truly terrible, and as long as you give them one
redeeming feature, readers are going to eventually be on their side. In fact, they're more likely to enjoy
a truly terrible character with one redeeming feature than a character with 17 redeeming features and
one terrible attribute. This is a lesson I have learned the hard way. We love awful people. We just love
them. We love specific people. So that's one tip or trick I'm going to give you for imperfection. Give
them a pet. Well, really give them one positive attribute. As long as you give them one of the virtues,
they can completely bat out of the rest of them on the list.
I'm also going to tell you another thing, which will make an imperfect character, no matter how terrible,
deeply, deeply sympathetic to the reader. And this one is fun because it works even if your character has
no redeeming features whatsoever. And I do think that this plays out in the example of Ronan Lynch as
well. And it is this, the pet possum paradox. Stick with me. Imagine you're driving along on the road. Oh,
this is going to be gross. You're driving along in the road and you see roadkill. It is an animal that has
been struck by a car. You look at it. "Don't be a dog, don't be a cat," you say. It's a possum. "Ugh," you
say, and you drive on. Off you go.
Now, what a strange reaction that is, right? It's still a thing that has been killed on the road. Why do we
not want it to be a dog or a cat, and why is a possum better? And maybe you're saying, "All living
creatures are good and holy," and God bless you. I'm happy for you. You're a great person. Talk to me
later, Tintin. All right. So the animal on this road, why do we say that? Because a dog or a cat is a pet,
right? Now imagine you're driving along on that road, and you're like, "No dog, no cat, please don't be
that." It's a possum, but the possum has a collar on it. It's got a name tag. Possum is its name, I guess.
Polly the possum. Now, suddenly, how do you feel about that moment? Suddenly, the moment has just
become a little more tragic, but why? It's still a possum. It's the exact same species by the side of the
road. No, the reason why it is sad to see a pet hit by the side of the road, well, sadder than seeing just a
regular animal hit by the side of the road, is the concept that we are feeling sympathy for a stranger who
loves that pet.
We are feeling empathy, not just for the creature, which is set here, we're feeling empathy beyond that
because that animal was loved, which gives it more value. You can use this in your novel when you're
waiting to reveal your terrible characters actual secret great attribute. If other people love that horrible
character, if Gansey and Adam are truly friends with Ronan, then we're going to believe them. We like
them, they're decent people for the most part, and they see something in Ronan, so we know that if
something happens to Ronan, they'll be sad. He has become the pet possum by the side of the road. You
can do this so efficiently, and it's such a great way to set up sympathy for characters that don't
otherwise have a lot of space on the page.
I was watching an episode of Scrubs, and there is a character that dies, a side character, a tertiary
character, after being admitted to their hospital for a couple of episodes. And the show, I thought, was
so incredibly cunning in the way that they handled it. We were supposed to have a very sad moment at
the end of this episode when this character died. But the truth is, they're a tertiary character. They
spend only a couple of minutes on the screen, and it's a sit-com, so how much investment are we really
going to have in them? However, the show runners made that moment so meaningful, not because they
asked us to invest in that character, which would have been a waste of time. We would have said, "It
doesn't matter how great of an old lady you made her into." We wouldn't care. They instead spent all of
their time taking the characters that we already knew and loved, and showing how they cared about
her. And that meant that when she finally died, and we watched them cry over her, then we were
moved, because, yes, it was sad that she had died. She was the possum by the side of the road, she was
their pet possum. And we were sad for the characters that were feeling about her. This is a great way to
make your imperfect character sympathetic before you have a chance to actually show their secret
heart of gold.
Picture the scene. You're in a dark theater, the silence is hushed and anticipatory, as everyone waits for
the movie to begin. The music starts, swelling, setting the tone. You whip out your first novel, you open
it up, you begin to read it. How does it begin? Does it start with a bang? It starts with something
interesting. It starts with a question. It starts with curiosity. It starts with specificity. Anything can be
interesting as long as you sell it, as long as you can textualize it for that reader. It's important to
remember, at this stage of writing too, that right now, even after everything we just talked about, we're
still not actually looking for the perfect opening for your novel, because we've got a long way to go.
Perfect beginning? No, what we need is just a good start.
VIDEO 19:
I'm not a very good public speaker. I realize that this is late in our relationship to confess this to you. It's
been five hours, and you've probably figured it out for yourself, but I'm not a very good public speaker. I
hem. I haw. I um. I er left to my own devices. I have to prepare immensely in order to be able to appear
in front of anyone and sound like I know what I'm doing. Each of these videos represents 8,000 million
gajillion takes so that I don't just stop in the middle of them and stare off into space in a long reverie.
I was actually such a terrible public speaker that when I first became an author, I was petrified at the
idea of having to do school visits. I thought, "I'm going to stand in front of people and talk at them?" I
hate listening to people first of all as an audience. I'm a terrible audience member, so all I could think
about was, "They're going to be me. It's going to be a whole auditorium full of mes. I'm going to bore
them to death, and that will be on me. I will have taken an hour of their time."
And like I said, I was awful at it in addition. I would stand up there, my hands all sweaty, um, uh, er,
undirected, wander in circles. It was so terrible that one of the very first school visits I did was to a
whole auditorium of seventh graders and I completely lost control of them. I mean, I was just so awful
they ended up taking them out of the auditorium and saying, "It's okay. You can just go home now."
Yeah. What I did is I came home, and I thought, "You have two options here. You can either never go
outside ever again, or you can learn how to talk to seventh graders." What I did was I set up my
computer camera and I wrote a school presentation. Now, I wrote the school presentation to sound like
I was being a very natural speaker, like I was just coming up with it on the fly right in that moment. But I
planned out every single pause, every single laugh, every single mistake of starting to say one thing and
then starting to say another thing instead. I just memorized an entire hour's presentation to sound like I
had not memorized it, and then I went out there and I gave that presentation. And guess what? It
worked fantastically. You couldn't stop me in the middle of it because I couldn't ad lib, but still it worked
way better. People would come up to me all the time and say, "Wow, you are an incredible public
speaker." No, I'm not. I'm a trained monkey.
It took me a very long time to realize that first of all, being a good public speaker was about being a well-
prepared public speaker, and that it didn't matter if I was naturally good at speaking in public or not.
And then it also took me awhile to learn that the better I got at public speaking as far as having more
experience, the better I got at being able to not have to memorize all of the pauses. Instead, eventually I
did become more natural at it. I had learned the skill of externalizing my thoughts for other people.
I watched a TED Talk a couple of years ago. And I know that now I've mentioned TED Talks more than
once in a seminar, which makes it sound like I watch a lot of them, and I really haven't. I think I've
watched two TED Talks in as many years. But still, this one stuck with me. This TED Talk was taught by a
man who taught people how to speak, how literally to pronounce their words. And I watched it because
I hate the way my voice sounds. I really do. It's not cool at all. People will think that I'm cool and then
they meet me and they say, "You're so cute." And I know it's because of my stupid voice. Also, I'm
pocket-sized. I realize this is a problem as well.
Anyway, I always hated my voice. I didn't just hate the tambour of my voice. I mean, many people don't
enjoy hearing themselves on recordings, which is a problem if you're making eight hours of them. Just
saying. But what I didn't like about my voice is that I mumble, and I know I humble, and I know why I
humble as well. When I was a child, scrawny, unfriendly, a writer, I also had a lot of dental work,
because I have a lot of teeth. I had a thousand more teeth than you were supposed to have. I was like a
shark. I had rows of them, the baby teeth, and then the adult teeth, and then the shark teeth, and then
the monster teeth, and then the Eldritch Horror teeth.
I just had so many teeth. Dentists would look at my mouth and they would gasp in shock and awe. They
would make casts of my face and use them as paperweights on their desks. This is not a joke. This is real.
My teeth were a thing of wonder and horror for all to behold, so I had a lot of dental work. I had braces.
I had those retainers. I had the head gears that you slept in. They looked like some kind of weird Tim
Burtonesque machine. Anyway, my mouth was always wired shut, open. Yeah. I mumbled because I
always had a mouthful of metal.
Anyway, I watched this guy's TED Talk and he was talking about how your voice is not for you, that a lot
of people felt strange about retraining themselves to speak, but the voice was an instrument that was
meant to be heard by someone else. You didn't need to say anything out loud if you were only
expressing it to yourself, because after all, your native language is where, boys and girls? In your head.
Right. Our natural language is abstract. And that revolutionized the way I thought about not only
speaking, but writing. Of course, yes, everything out loud is for someone else. Why wouldn't you make
that instrument better for other people?
Right. I tell you this now because this video that we're talking about now is prose. And prose is
something that I study endlessly, because guess what? Prose, words on the page, that is for someone
else. All right. Let's dig in.
Prose, words, word choice. The how we tell the story is equally as important as the story itself. In fact,
depending on your writing style I think is more important than the story itself. And I can demonstrate.
Imagine your favorite writer. And I hope it's me. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kind of kidding. Anyway, so
your favorite writer, why are they your favorite? Think about it. Part of it is probably where they choose
to set their cameras. It's how they look at the world. It's how they think of people. But imagine you've
gotten a new novel from this favorite writer. I hope that it's me and not a dead writer. Otherwise, this is
a very mystical example.
All right, you have a new book from this favorite writer and you open it up and before you know
anything about the story you read the first page and just that page makes you sigh with happiness
because that's what you wanted. It's like coming home again. That's the how they tell a story. That's the
magic of prose. It's that specific.
Prose is also genre-specific. It signals to the reader what kind of story they're going to be looking at. If
you are reading a fast-paced thriller, it's going to be more clipped and invisible and if you're reading a
dense literary memoir, it's more likely to be full of figurative language, a thicket of words that
encourages you to use your noggin.
Right. I think of prose as existing along a spectrum. On one side, there is that invisible prose and on the
other side, there is voicey prose. Now, invisible prose tends to be used for again, things like thrillers.
What you're trying to do with invisible prose is get in and get out. This workman-like prose doesn't call
attention to itself. It's conveying the story as efficiently as possible. It wants to make sure that you're not
spending any processing power on those words. You are just gobbling up that story as quickly as
possible.
Then on the other side, you have this voicey prose, and it sounds like the character or it sounds like the
narrator and it encourages you to luxuriate in the fun of linguistics. "Look at me," shouts every single
sentence. "Look how much fun I'm having rolling and frolicking around and all of the things that the
English language can do."
Now, most prose will exist somewhere along the spectrum instead, but while you're choosing what your
story is going to be, it's worthwhile to look at some examples, which is what we're about to do. We're
going to take a look at two workman-like proses, invisible prose, and we're going to take a look at two
voicier proses. We're going to do third person and first person to hopefully get you an idea of what they
look like on the page.
Our first example is the prologue of Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, a quite well-known thriller. Possibly you
have already read it, but when you look at this page, I want you to admire the absolute invisibility of this
prose. These words are designed to put a picture in your head and then escape without you ever
thinking about the fact that you're reading. It's encouraging you to rip through this thriller as quickly as
possible. That's a great commercial move.
Prologue. Renowned curator, Jacques Sauniere, staggered through the vaulted archway at the
museum's grand gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the
gilded frame, the 76-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and
Sauniere collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
As he had anticipated, a thundering iron gate fell nearby, barricading the entrance to the suite. The
parquet floor shook. Far off, an alarm began to ring. The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath,
taking stock. "I am still alive." He crawled out from under the canvas and scanned the cavernous space
for someplace to hide. A voice spoke chillingly close. "Do not move." On his hands and knees, the
curator froze, turning his head slowly.
Notice there's not a single unnecessary word in there. There's no wordplay. We're just in. We are out. It
keeps us moving fast and brisk. It's also in third person. We're not in the narrator's voice.
This next example is from chapter one of The Hunger Games from Suzanne Collins. This is also great
invisible prose. It's a very world and plot-heavy trilogy, and the words get in and get out, trying to propel
you through this story. Now, what's interesting about this is that it's in first person, which means that
we're hearing it in the words of Katniss. However, it's kept from being incredibly voicey and tangled
because Katniss herself is a very blunt and brisk sort of narrator for us. This is her natural voice. She
makes a great choice for propelling us through this super quickly.
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim's warmth, but
finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with
our mother. Of course she did. This is the day of the reaping.
I prop myself up on one elbow. There's enough light in the bedroom to see them. My little sister, Prim,
curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother's body, their cheeks pressed together. In sleep, my
mother looks younger, still worn down, but not so beaten down. Prim's face is as fresh as a raindrop, as
lovely as the Primrose for which she was named. My mother was very beautiful once too, or so they tell
me.
Look how efficient it is. Look how even though it's in first person and we're listening to her tell us the
story, it still wastes no words at all. It's quite incredible.
Now let's head to some examples of voicey prose instead. Generally speaking, invisible prose works in
books that are showcasing the world or the plot and voicey prose showcases character or mood. Our
first example is from that book I mentioned several videos ago, Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist by my
editor, David Levithan. Now, it's in first person and I want you to see how this voicey prose is again,
inefficient, but incredibly, incredibly specific and immediately gives us an idea of who Nick is as a person.
Also, it sets the tone of this book. That's all this prose wants to do. It's not trying to pull you through a
quick thriller because we're not going to cover a whole ton of plot events over the course of this book.
We're covering someone's internal journey instead.
Chapter one, Nick. The day begins in the middle of the night. I am not paying attention to anything but
the bass in my head, the noise in my ears. Dev is screaming. Tom is flailing and I am the clockwork. I am
the one who takes this thing called music and lines it up with this thing called time. I am the ticking. I am
the pulsing. I am underneath every part of this moment. We don't have a drummer. Dev has thrown off
his shirt and Tom is careening into feedback and I am behind them. I am the generator.
I am listening and I am not listening because what I'm playing isn't something I'm thinking about. It's
something I'm feeling all over. All eyes are on us, or at least that's what I can imagine in my stage
blindness. It's a small room and we're a big noise and I am a non-queer bassist in a queer core band who
was filling the room with undertone and Dev screams, "Fuck the man. Fuck the man. I really want to fuck
the man."
All of this is voice. All of it is just telling us who Nick is. It's also telling us that he's a bass player, not a
drummer, which means that when I told you earlier that he was a drummer, I was totally wrong. And I'm
sorry. Please forgive me. But what I want to point out with this voicey prose is that yeah, it's inefficient.
It's not carrying us through a plot, but it is doing its job as hard as it can, which is putting you right inside
Nick's head and putting you right inside this book's mood.
The second example of voicey prose is in third person and it's from an author you might know named
Maggie Stiefvater, Maggie Stiefvater. Yep. She's a favorite in this house, I think. All right, here we go.
This is from Call Down the Hawk.
Chapter one. Creatures of all kinds had begun to fall asleep. The cat was the most dramatic. It was a
beautiful animal, if you liked cats, with a dainty face and long cottony fur, the kind that seemed like it
would melt away into liquid sugar. It was a Calico, which under normal circumstances would mean it was
certainly not an it, but rather a she. Calico had to be inherited from two X chromosomes. Perhaps that
rule didn't apply here, though, in this calmly rural cottage nearly no one knew about. Forces other than
science held domain in this place. The Calico might not even be a cat at all. It was cat-shaped, but so
were some birthday cakes. It had watched them kill him.
Now, this chapter is about an action scene. This guy is about to be killed and they're about to kill it yet
another person after that, and yet here we are wandering through a study of cats to set tone and mood
and voice instead. it's telling you what kind of book is going to come next. And then you keep that
promise.
Have you guys seen The Italian Job? I mentioned it earlier. It's one of those car movies where they steal
the gold in Mini Coopers. It's great, I think. It's probably not great. I don't know. I like it. Anyway, in The
Italian Job, there is an old dude there, a thief, and he uses a specific phrase all the time. And his
daughter learns this phrase and says it as well. Then years later after the dude has died, the bad guy
figures out that the daughter is actually this guy's daughter, because she says the phrase and he
recognizes it and it's such an unusual phrase.
This happens to us as writers in novels. I said before many videos ago that one of the things that we had
to be careful of was writing ourselves by accident into our books, and that counts for our language as
well. We have all kinds of sneaky phrases that are specific to us that we don't think about until we've
written them into a book multiple times and people will point them out in Goodreads reviews. Not
saying that I speak from experience or anything, but.
Here is a phrase that I know is exclusive to me and I don't think I put it into any one of my books because
I learned it was exclusive to me far before I got published. But it's this: airco. Do you say it? Does anyone
say it? My mom says it. If she was that dude in The Italian job, the bad guy would definitely be able to
link us. Airco. That means air conditioning. I realized that no one else says that. They say AC. I say airco.
But if I hadn't had friends who laughed and pointed at me when I said it in college, I would have just
written it into a manuscript and I would have had more than one character say it. That's the problem. It
doesn't matter if someone takes one of your weird exclusive phrases and it becomes theirs. What
matters is if you don't realize it's weird and exclusive and you just give it to everybody, then suddenly
everyone starts to sound like you. No bueno, as they say.
It's useful to become a scientist of words, not just other people's words, but your words. Keep in mind
when you say something over and over and over again, "Here is a thing that I say a lot." Here's the thing.
I say that a lot. Here's another thing I do. I start conversations with, "Look." "Look," I'll say to whoever it
is. "Look at me. Look," and I have to fight against the temptation to begin my dialogue with, "Look,"
right?
Yes. You need to become a scientist of your own language. Also, be aware of moving targets of
linguistics around you. Slang. Slang can be sneaky. Sometimes language looks like it's there to stay
because it's everywhere, small spelled with an O. I really like the way that looks by the way, smoll. It
really looks smaller than small spelled with an A, but unfortunately, I don't think people are going to be
saying it in 20 years, and so I have to use it sparingly, right? Smoll.
Or let's take a flashback to my debut novel, Lament. I was a little bit less careful about what kind of slang
I used back then. I didn't think to myself, "All right, is this really going to be around?" And if you read
those books, they're already pretty dated, not really dated, but they're pretty dated. The dialogue in
particular, you'll notice that the teams talk more like what teams spoke like a decade ago or maybe even
12 years before that, because that was when I was writing them.
In particular, please note use of the word freakin', because back then ... I know you guys can't imagine
that now in the year of our Lord, 2020 ... However, back then nobody said fuck. I mean, if you did, you
were showed out of school. It was a bad word back then. And I know right now you're going, "It's a bad
word now," but have you seen the internet? It's not really. It's not really. It's now become it's the new
freakin', but back then people said freakin' because they had not yet upgraded to fuck. And so yeah, the
books are full of that and it has made them into a time capsule. And moreover, it makes it sound like a
specific version of me saying it through them. Yeah. Nowadays, I think about slang very carefully. I think
about my word choices very carefully and I try to make sure that I am not writing myself into my prose.
It might be feeling pretty daunting now to imagine filling a page with words. Once you think about prose
for any length of time, sometimes you just decide, "Maybe I'm not going to write any prose at all ever." I
understand. That first step of getting from abstract to concrete feels like such an enormous one. It feels
like those first words should mean something. It feels like you know that you're really not supposed to
shoot for perfect, But maybe that first line could be perfect.
All right. Here is some solutions, some strategies for helping you get that first word out of your head.
Number one, read it out loud. I read almost all of my first chapters out loud and sometimes way more
than my first chapters, however much it takes to get them out of my head. I picture that book that I
want to write in my head and then I imagine the voice of my favorite audio book narrator and then in
that voice, I read that first line out loud and I type down what I've heard. And then I do it again for the
next sentence and the next sentence and the next sentence until it no longer feels like there's so much
pressure for that first paragraph to be perfect because there's already other paragraphs there.
All right, second option is to block in the shape of the page. What do I mean by this? I mean that you
would type first line here and then you would type dialogue here and then an angry reply. The dog runs
by. Descriptive paragraph through here describing the house, just describing what every single chapter
or every single paragraph, rather, is doing throughout the chapter. And that way it's like scaffolding. It's
a miniature scaffolding, but just forgetting the shape of the chapter in play, which brings us to the third
possibility, which is that sometimes it just helps to just write what happens in the chapter.
I don't mean as in prose at all. I mean just a narrative description. No style. Just words. Sun comes out.
We look at the house. We meet these two characters. They have a brief fight. The dog runs in front of
the car and they save it. End of the chapter. And that way you can go back through and later populate it
with actual prose now that you no longer have to untangle the actual order of events.
And then the final version. Well, this isn't really my method of getting things out of my head. This is
more of a sociopath's version of getting things out of their head, but I'm going to tell it to you just in
case it helps. I have this friend, one of my writing partners, Brenna Yovanoff. She writes excellent horror
novels. And when we first started working together, she had started a manuscript. She was having some
trouble with it. We were talking in chat and I said, "Just go ahead and send it to me and I'll take a look
and see what's going on."
And she replied back, oh, well she didn't know if it was actually ready for someone to look at yet. And I
said, "Oh, come on, Brenna. I'm not going to judge it for not being complete. I mean, we're friends here,
right? I'm just going to look at it and I'll see what I can do." She was like, "I just don't think you'll get it."
And I said, "Oh, come on. Now you're being kind of insulting." She said, "Oh, you know, fine. I'll send it
to you, but okay, fine, I'll send it to you."
And she sent me her manuscript. And the first page, when I looked at it, first of all, there were very few
words on it. It was solid text, but very few words. It would say something like, "He walked across the
street, comma, comma, commonly. He comma comma, comma, comma, comma. The dog barked and
then comma, comma, comma." When I say comma, comma, comma. What I mean is that there would
be commas in a row like ellipses, but commas, and they would take up the space where you would think
there would be words. There would be spaces between them. Sometimes it would be half of a word.
And then some more commas. Comma, comma, commaly. He comma comma comma.
I looked at this and I got back on chat with Brenna. And I said, "First of all, okay, I looked at your draft
and are you a serial killer? And when you choose your victims, are they bad people? Because I need to
know. Second of all, what is happening?" And Brenna said, "Well, it takes me so much effort to get the
things out of my head that I need to see what it will look like on the page first. So I put it in the commas
because I know there'll be a block of description or something there and I'll put that in there, or I know I
need a word or something for pacing there. I know what a page is supposed to look like and I just put
the commas in there." I said, "What about this one? Comma, comma, commaly." She goes, "Well, I'm
going to need an adverb."
Right. But it works for her because that's what it takes for her to make that step between abstract and
concrete. She needs to literally see the shape before she can put the words in it. So yeah, find a system
that works for you for getting the words out there. And remember, it can be so far from the finished
draft. A rough draft is for you.
Exercise time. This time I really do mean jumping jacks. Get up there. No, I don't. No, I don't. I never
mean jumping jacks. They're the worst. All right. Get some water. Go on. All right. Exercise, exercise.
Back when I was an artist, I used to do a method of learning that a lot of artists do, which is I would copy
the old masters. That's actually how I ended up forging the old masters with the heads of cats on them
to pay my rent.
Anyway, the principle behind copying folks who are better at it than you is that you will learn their tips
and tricks and tools and you'll be able to adopt the ones that need to use for your own technique. I
would like to encourage you to do the same thing with your writing. Imagine the first page of your
imaginary book now and write it in five different prose styles. Write it like five different authors who you
respect. Really try and throw yourself into it. Try and look at their word choice and ask yourself, "Why
do they choose these words? Why does it look like this author? Why are they making the decisions that
they do? Are their sentences long? Are they invisible? Are they voicey? What makes them who they
are?"
And then throw yourself into it as much as possible, keeping in mind that as you are learning to sound
like them. Sounding like them is not the same as telling a story like them. Being Maggie Stiefvater is not
just turning a phrase like Maggie Stiefvater. Instead, writing like Maggie Stiefvater ... My name no longer
sounds like my name after I say it multiple times ... Writing like Maggie Stiefvater is more than word
choice and word format and paragraph shape. It's, again, what I choose to point the camera at, how I
think of the world, what my priorities are in a storytelling style. That is a harder thing to forge. But for
this exercise, that's not what you're doing. You're looking at our prose. You're trying to take the tools of
that prose and seeing what sounds right for A, your story and B, your voice.
VIDEO 20:
We are now at this stage, deep in the process of drafting, deep in the process of translation. We are
working hard at this point to get our story out of here and onto the page. It can start to get pretty
tangled, messy, discouraging, exciting, challenging, at this point. I think it's always worthwhile to take a
moment to remember that you're doing this for the reader. You're not just sitting there throwing work
into a page. Instead, imagine him or her or them sitting there opening your book and getting to
experience your story just as you experience it in your head. Remember what we said before, if you
speak out loud, your voice is for someone else. This work is for them. Let us talk now about the shape of
stuff on a page, what goes on a page. What the role of each paragraph and word is going to be.
The truth is that I can often tell at first glance looking at an unpublished manuscript where the aspiring
writer's weaknesses in pacing may be hiding because we have a very standard kind of look to a page.
You can see a natural, organic breathing pattern to the length of paragraph, to what the paragraphs do.
This is the reason why in the earlier video, when I talked about Brenna using that method of blocking in
her paragraph shapes with commas, this is why it works. And I'm going to show you. Let's take a look at
three pages from three of my novels. Now, look at these guys. These are the blocked out paragraphs.
You can see that they're all in various different sizes. They're like a good mix tape. All pages are like a
good mix tape. They're formed of a combination of long and short paragraphs doing different
complimentary jobs.
When you put them together, they create this organic rhythm, like breathing. Paragraphs are to
chapters as sentences are to paragraphs. They give you these natural pauses that guide the reader's
pacing through the chapter. If you have too many run on sentences, it makes us feel breathless. And
rather than giving us a sense of urgency intention, it has the opposite effect. It sounds like, and then this
happened and then this happened and then this happened. We never had a chance to actually think
about what we've done. Likewise, if you have a huge chunk of description, we sit there and we wallow
and we crawl to a halt. It's a mix tape, you want them to match, but if they're too samey, it all starts to
run together. When I talk about pacing a page, I'm not always talking about making it move briskly.
Speed isn't always the goal.
Sit with your feelings, as the internet says. Instead, we're trying to control both fast and slow. We want
them to experience escalating tension as our acts are constructed and we finally get to this amazing
conclusion. And also within a chapter, we're doing the same thing, organic breathing patterns slowly
ratcheting up the tension and emotional stakes. Let's take a closer look at everything that you can put
into a chapter. Each of those grayed out paragraphs is doing multiple jobs, but they'll have a primary job
which can usually be classified as one of these things; physical setting, personal description, dialogue,
physical action, internal action and thought, backstory and remembered action, miscellaneous
exposition and something I just call punctuation. What I'm going to do now is we're going to break down
each of these different things that words can do and then, finally, we're going to look at an entire
chapter and break it down paragraph by painful paragraph.
When I devote words to a physical setting, when I'm setting the location of a chapter and then
describing where it is, I'm not generally trying to actually get the reader to have a fully accurate physical
experience of the scene. I don't need them to be able to draw me a map. I don't need them to be able to
draw me a picture of it. What I'm trying to do when I use words to describe a scene is this. First of all,
how does this place feel? Not to the character, although that's important. I want to use the setting to
control how the reader feels about the scene. I want to ground the action. I want to describe it well
enough that they can have an emotional image in their head of what it looks like. The truth is that I have
readers all over the world. If I set a book in a very specific place, if I set a chapter in a very specific place
in rural Virginia, if I put it out in my barn next to the cows that live next door, that hate me.
If I describe that barn, even if I do it as hard as I can, a reader on the other side of the world is likely
going to come away with a different image in their head of what it looks like, unless I'm actually,
literally, drawing a picture. Instead, what I need to do is create an emotional truth. Yes, all of the things
that are needed for the scene, that they have to interact with, they need to understand as readers what
those look like. But as far as the precise shape, size, dimensions of the barn, what they need to know is
what it feels like to be in that setting.
I also control the pacing. Wait, I put that down too fast. Am I going to do it again? Yeah. Here we go.
Control the pacing. Control the pacing. Every single paragraph has to do two jobs, three jobs. In this
case, physical description and control the pacing. The amount of time that I spend on a description
changes how fast that reader is moving through the scene. Let's say that I just went through a very fast
section and I want them to sit back on their heels and think about it. I can slow them down as they move
through the page by putting a big block of text on there that they have to slowly wander their way
through. Remember those images of the pages, the big gray blocks, that's going to slow me down. If
that's a description I'm using it on purpose. It's not just to tell them what the barn looks like, controlling
the reader's experience.
And then finally, I use setting descriptions to reveal something about the characters who are in that
scene. I never pick a scene just because it's useful. I never pick a setting just because it's the most logical
one, no. The setting is going to tell me something different about the character, reveal something
interesting about them, a nuance or something that we wanted to know, an interesting facet of their
personality, or tease out some memory of theirs because of how they interact with that location. It's just
good, efficient story writing. But how? How am I picking a setting? How am I picking a setting? Like I
said, I'm looking for a logical decision. I'm looking for a decision in setting that shows me something
about the characters involved, but I'm also looking for something surprising, something inventive. I
often like to think about what would be a nice opposite sort of setting to what it is that's happening.
For instance, you can make an exciting scene, surprising and inventive if you set it someplace very
mundane. If you have an action scene that tears through an SPCA or a boring corporate office, that's an
interesting kind of juxtaposition. Likewise, if you take a mundane moment and you put it into an exciting
scene, then that's also interesting and can elevate a quiet moment into something more memorable. A
great example of this is there's a very quiet conversation in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It takes place while
Ferris Bueller is singing on a parade float. We can use those same tips and tricks in our setting decisions
to take a quiet moment and make it seem bigger so that it's worthy of an entire chapter. Maybe you're
hiding one quiet character revelation or a conversation within a big bombastic set piece. Or sometimes
you can take a big, big moment and you can make it seem intimate and more personal by stuffing it into
a much smaller scene.
Another tip that I want to talk about is I want to talk about using the same location again and again and
again. This is a trick that I was taught from some old TV writing book I think I read. I wish I could
remember what it was. If any of you know what it was, drop me a line and I'll update the PDF. But I
remember that the advice was that if you return to a setting again, in a show or in a movie that you
should do it at a different time of day. Something about the setting should be changed so that the
viewer is always getting to look at something new and interesting. Now, do I think that you have to do
that? No. Is it a rule that I think about constantly? No. Do I lose sleep if I think that I've set a scene in the
same place at the same time of day in the same way more than once? No. But I do think about it.
I do ask myself, can I return to this setting and learn something different about either it or a character?
Can I make it feel different? After all, my entire goal is to take the reader on a journey to show them
something interesting and take them on a trip to a place that they haven't been. And if I keep on taking
them back to the same kitchen at the same time of day, well, the action better be pretty exciting in the
kitchen because the setting is not doing any work. Can I make it take place in the rain? Can I make it take
place at night? And can I maybe just make it take place in the pantry instead? Setting descriptions are
like many things in writing, very genre dependent. How much detail you throw into your settings very
much depends on what genre you're writing in and what the rest of the voice of your books seem like.
I know that for me, I'm always going to prefer the emotional truth, the mood of a setting, of a character,
of a situation to anything else. And so for me, that's what I prioritize. Now, that said, I'm going to take a
look now at a paragraph from one of my novels, from The Dream Thieves, because I want to describe
not only how my setting descriptions describe the emotional truth of a place, but how they also are
more interested in describing the people who are within those descriptions. I also want to talk about
how, like every other kind of paragraph in your book, every paragraph needs to earn its keep by doing at
least two things. It should be doing setting and character. It should be doing plot and setting. It can be
doing character and mood, but it's got to be doing more than one things.
All right, let's take a look. This paragraph is from The Dream Thieves. Ronan is meeting a character
named Kavinsky at an abandoned fairground where they're having a substance party. A bunch of
hooligans are sitting around in their cars, parked and setting things on fire. Let's see how I describe the
setting.
Ordinarily, the abandoned fairground was pitch-black at night, out of reach of the lights of Henrietta and
far from any houses. But tonight, the floodlights splashed sterile white light over the grass, illuminating
the restless forms of more than a dozen cars. There was something unbearably sexy about cars at night,
Ronan thought. The way the fenders twisted the light and reflected the road, the way every driver
became anonymous. The sight of them knocked his heartbeat askew.
Now, is this really about the fairground? Yes. It grounds us, right? We understand that we're headed to a
fairground. Do we know how to park the cars there? Are they driving into the grass? Are there buildings
there? Lots of buildings. Do we imagine that it was abandoned for a long time? What do we know
physically about this place? Not a lot, but we understand the feeling of this place. Also, notice that even
though we understand that there are lots of cars parked there, do we care about the cars? No, but we
care about how Ronan feels about the cars. I'm going to hold up a card that I've held up a bunch of times
now.
Write what you know. I know, I know. Okay, fine. It's fine advice. It's fine advice. It applies to setting as
well. It's worth noting that setting, however, like character is subtractive. This fairground actually does
exist. When I am writing, I'm often in that kind of scavenging, stealing place. I'm looking for specificity of
place. I'm generally always thinking about that, actually, as I'm living. I'm always trying to look at a scene
and saying, "All right, all right. What would I pull from this? What do I need?" The truth is that it's
situational though. Because again, setting is subtractive. What do you need to remove to make sure the
focus is on what you want to look at? So this fairground, obviously, I went to it. It's a real place. So I
could tell you how many buildings were there. If you had to park on the grass, what the road was like
that I pulled off of. I know everything about this, zip code, whatever, but I didn't need all of that for the
scene.
So I scavenge widely and then I prune liberally. It's now exercise time. Thinking exercise, not jumping
jack exercise. I promised you it was never going to be jumping jacks. I want you to take your first scene
or a scene from your current manuscript and see if you can switch around the setting. See what it feels
like if you move just that chapter from one setting that you've used again to a different time of day or
different kind of weather, or try taking it from a small location to a big location and ask yourself how
that changes it. This is one of my big tips in revision. So many times I've elevated a scene that seems
incredibly dull by making the setting exciting. It revolutionizes it because instantly I get drama. By the
way, the characters are interacting with the location or vice versa. A lot of times a scene is too big,
taking up too much room and by putting it into someplace that's a little bit more mundane, it takes up
less space and moves more quickly through the drift.
VIDEO 21:
Personal description, the way your characters look, the way you described them on page is not only
genre dependent, but it's also a personal choice. I know that the way I write characters on the page is
very much influenced by how I like to read character descriptions as a reader. I don't care if a character
has dreamy hazel eyes, unless those Hazel eyes are important for me to recognize them later in some
fraught moment, or unless those hazel eyes come attached some emotional moment instead. Their
eyes, no I don't really care what they look like. And part of this is how I am as a reader, and part of it is
how my brain is wired. It's very difficult for me to put together what a person might look like based upon
a text description. I couldn't draw you a picture of a character based upon text description, generally
speaking. I don't see it in my mind's eye that way. So therefore it feels like useless information to me.
What I want to know is instead, how does it feel to look at that character? How does my narrator feel
when they see that character? How does that character's physical appearance shape the way they move
through the world. That's all I care about with physical description.
Now, physical description can change depending on first-person or third-person. The important thing to
remember with first-person of course, is that the only things you can see are what your narrator sees. So
if your narrator is not very observant, or if your narrator is judgmental, or if you're a narrator is short,
then they can't see what's above their vision. That's a joke because I'm short and my husband jokes that
I can't see anything in the house that's above eye level. It's funny because it's true. Right, so first-person
narrators are telling you not only about the thing they're looking at, but they're also telling you about
themselves. And they're also deeply biased.
Let's take a quick look at a first-person description of another character from The Scorpio Races. "Sean
Kendrick opens the door. He looks at me. I look at him. This close, he's almost too severe to be
handsome: sharp edge cheekbones and razor edge, nose, and dark eyebrows. His hands are bruised and
torn from his time with the capaill uisce. Like the fishermen on the island, his eyes are permanently
narrowed against the sun and the sea. He looks like a wild animal. Not a friendly one. I don't say
anything. He gets into the truck. When he shuts the door., I'm squeezed between Thomas Gratton's
great leg, which I imagine is as ruddy as the rest of him and Sean Kendrick's rigid one. We are shoulder
to shoulder due to the size of the cab, and if Gratton is made of flour and potatoes, Sean is made of
stone and driftwood, and possibly those prickly anemones that sometimes wash up on shore".
So this description is telling us what Sean looks like. Yeah, but you're also not going to be able to really
draw a portrait from this description. It's not really sufficient to know that he has sharp cheekbones, and
a sharp nose. And dark eyebrows; that's a pretty vague. It's really just telling us about the space
between Puck and Sean, and Sean and the Islanders. Look at how she compares and contrasts him with
Thomas Gratton, who was more approachable. Right? Thomas Gratton offered her a ride and he's pretty
friendly. He's a ruddy and comforting. He's, "Made of flour and potatoes". Do we really think that he
looks like flour and potatoes? No, you can't draw Thomas Gratton based upon this description, but you
can understand what kind of space he takes up in the world. The comforting kind of space of flour and
potatoes, because who doesn't want to eat flour and potatoes? Well, me, I'm allergic to wheat, but
okay. Maybe rice flour and potatoes, delicious. All right. And then if you look at Sean, obviously, like I
said, you can't draw a picture of him and you don't really think that he's, "Made of stone and driftwood"
and, "Anemones", but you understand that no-one is giving him a hug anytime soon. And that's more
important to me than what he actually looks like.
Let's take a look at another one here. This is Puck looking at Gabe. I want you to see in this description,
how Puck is looking at Gabe, her brother, and it's not really just about how Gabe looks; it's about how
Puck feels about her relationship to Gabe.
"Of course, there's Gabe. And he sees me instantly. He's sweeping the walk in front of the hotel with a
mighty push broom. The hotel is a forbidding ivy covered building behind him, the leaves cut neat
squares to let the sun into the windows with their bright blue sills. The height of the hotel blocks, the
morning, light and casts, a blue shadow on the stone walk he sweeps. Gabe looks tall and grown up,
with his brown jacket stretched across his broad shoulders. His ginger blonde hair creeps down the back
of his neck, a little long, but he is still handsome. I feel a sudden surge of fierce pride that he is my
brother. He stops what he's doing to lean on the end of the broom and watch me cantor by on Dove.
"Don't be mad". I shout at him. A smile walks over one side of his face, but not the other. He almost
looks like he's actually happy, if you've never seen one of his real ones. The sad thing is this: I've gotten
used to this fake one. I've become willing to wait for the real one to reappear without realizing I should
have been working hard to find it again."
Now this description of Gabe not only tells us what his physical description is, right? He's got, "Ginger
blonde hair". It's, "A little long". Does that mean he has a mullet? We don't know; he's tall. You're not
going to draw a picture of Gabe from this description, but we understand the crux of the matter. We
know that he's older. We know how Puck feels about him; she's proud of him. We know that she's fond
of him. And we also see in there, the crux of the relationship problems that she knows that he is not
happy, and she has been willing to let it slide for a long time. This is a very early chapter in the book, and
basically she's about to find out that if she had paid better attention to this, that maybe she wouldn't be
in this situation, she's about to get into.
First-person personal description is biased because we're seeing it through the eyes of the protagonists
and we're hearing it in their voice. It's not only limited by what they look at; it's also limited by their
language and the words they use to frame a situation. It can also be limited as we'll talk a little bit later,
about whether or not they're being truthful or honest. Does Puck really think that Sean is a little too
severe to be handsome? Or does she actually think he's a stone cold hottie? She loves anemones. Yeah.
Anyway, third-person is a little bit less biased because you have that step back. But it's important to
remember that even in third-person, there's the bias that comes from the distance to the narrator. If
you're writing third-person close i.e not omniscient, i.e. you're actually in the narrator's head, although
in third-person, it means that your description is still going to be colored by the language and limits of
the observation of the character.
Here's an example from my short story, Opal, which is told from the point of view in third-person of an
inhuman character, a little hooved girl who was pulled out of dreams and now lives in the real world.
"The bench was occupied by different people at different times, and they were all right. But really her
favorite was a person who returned again and again, always at the same time of day, except if it was
raining. She was a fluffy cloud-shaped lady with fluffy cloud-colored hair. And she always came to the
bench with a book and a food. The books were never the same book. They were fat and brick shaped,
and the fronts always bore images of men who didn't seem to have any shirts or other possessions.
Sometimes all they seem to have was another man or sometimes a lady, or sometimes both, who they
held tightly. The foods were also never the same food."
Now this description of this lady, again, how accurate is it really? Can you draw a picture of, "A fluffy
cloud-shaped lady with fluffy cloud-colored hair"? No, probably not. However, do you know what that
feels like? I think so. I think we have an idea in our head of the type of person that is. Notice how this a
woman that she's watching and probably has a very full life of coming to this lovely bench and reading
her romances. But because Opal has no context for what a romance novel is, all of the description is
seen through the limitations of what Opal can actually see. third-person bias, exists just as strongly as
first-person bias.
It wasn't exactly true what I said earlier, that in third-person it was possible to be somewhat less biased
because the truth is even if you grab an omniscient third-person, narrator, omniscient; a narrator who
sees everything, who knows everything, who is not on the ground experiencing the action themselves.
It's still biased because it's still being seen through the lens of the tone of your book. Narration in
omniscient books are always promising you what it is that you're going to experience, and descriptions
are no different.
Let's take a look now at the omniscient description of Ronan Lynch from the beginning of Call Down the
Hawk. Most of Call Down the Hawk is told in close third-person, but the prologue is told in omission;
stepped back.
"Ronan, the middle brother defended his safety by being as frightening as possible. Like the other Lynch
brothers, he was a regular church goer, but most people assumed he played for the other team. He
dressed in funeral black and had a Raven as a pet. He shaved his hair close to his skull, and his back was
inked with a clawed and toothed tattoo. He wore an acidic expression and said little. What words he did
unsheathe turned out to be knives, glinting, and edged, and unpleasant to have stuck into you. He had
blue eyes. People generally think blue eyes are pretty, but his were not. They were not cornflower, sky,
baby, indigo, azure. His were iceberg, squall, hypothermia, eventual death. Everything about him
suggested he might take your wallet or drop your baby. He was proud of the family name, and it suited
him. His mouth was always shaped like he'd finished saying it."
Now this description does not really tell you what Ronan looks like. It gives you some physical traits, I
suppose. You understand that he has a shaved head and he has a tattoo on his back. He's dressed in
black. It's an emotional truth of who Ronan Lynch is. But more important, it describes the tone of the
book. It's promising the book that you are in for, every single word is telling you a story.
Character description happens in two places. One: when we first see the new character, and two: when
we have time for it. Now, the problem with this is that these two conditions are not always the same.
Sometimes for instance, we're running through an action scene and we see a character for the first time,
what are we supposed to do? We can't stop and give a lengthy description about the tattoo on their
back and how we thought that he played for the other team or whatever. No, instead we've got to obey
the rules of pacing. But at the same time, it doesn't make sense to also continue on down the page and
then a couple of pages later say, "By the way that guy I saw a couple of paragraphs ago, I should
mention he had dreamy hazel eyes. Also a tattoo shaped like a heart on his forehead."
No, we have to find a way to make it work, which means that a lot of times when you're running through
an action scene and you see a character briefly, you need to remember to make it memorable, make it
count, make it short, and that way, if you need to refer back to them again later, you'll have something
to hold onto. Likewise, remember you don't necessarily need to know that it's a tall guy chasing you
through there if you're never going to see them again; you need to know the emotional truth of the
person who is chasing you.
Now, I'm going to look at a tiny little description here that takes place in a snapshot. Ronan is in an
elevator and the doors open up, and he has just a brief moment to see a new character. "The elevator
door opened. It was not the ground floor. It was the third floor, the one with the masks, a woman
waited on the other side, hands in the pockets of a gray bomber jacket. First Ronan saw the way she
stood. Tense, coiled, a predator. Then he saw her hair: golden. Then her eyes pretty: blue. Cornflour,
sky, baby, indigo, azure."
So a couple of things about this description. Look at these short sentences. It's moving us quickly
through an action scene. Also look at the things that I feel like I need. First of all, I want you to know
how to feel when you see her; she's, "Tense, coiled, a predator". I need you to know that she is
recognizable, because later I'm going to tell you that she looks like Ronan's dead mother, who has
golden hair. So I need that, "Golden" and the blue eyes, "Blue". I need the bomber jacket, so that later,
as I'm running through action scenes, if we just glimpse her, guess what? I'm going to show you a gray
bomber jacket. And then finally, let's call back to the tone of Ronan's eyes, so that he knows darn well
what kind of eyes he is looking at. Lynch eyes; not his acidic ones, but rather the beautiful ones of his
dead mother.
So again, what am I describing? I'm describing the emotional truth of the person in the scene. I'm
describing the relationship of the character to the other character. I'm describing anything that is a
physical trait that I think that I might want to grab later if I need to refer to them quickly. I'm describing,
very basically, what they look like, so that the reader can get a sense in their head of this cast of
characters thrown together. A notable exception for this is that I've become more explicit with my skin
color lately. I used to never mention it. Unless it was important to the story, I would leave it out. Now I
understand that generally speaking, many readers will just default to a white character unless you
actually specify it. Now I take my time, and I make sure that I actually describe skin color, both white and
not white, because it's important to be explicit.
Now, the last thing I want to talk about is that there is a difference between what I want as a writer, and
what the reader wants as far as, a reader. What they need out of a physical description. Like I said, what
I want is that emotional truth. Readers are almost always going to ask me for more physical truth. They
want to be able to see it. They want to be able to draw it. They want to know exactly what it is. They
don't always need that though. They might want it. So balancing their wants, and their needs, and the
pacing, and the demands of the voice of the story, these are all of the decisions that I make while I'm
writing personal description.
Now it's time for an exercise. Still not jumping jacks. I want you to describe people in your life. I want
you to try and describe their emotional truth. What do you look like? What do your siblings look like?
Your best friend? What does, take a celebrity that you either love or you loathe, and describe them?
What's the crux of the matter? How quickly can you sketch in what they look like? What they feel like, to
look like? And then see if you can plug it into your prose, and just try it out. What does it look like to put
in a big, long description? What does it look like to put it in a short one? Can you practice using the long
paragraphs and the short paragraphs to move the reader through the scene?
VIDEO 22:
Dialogue is not meant to be a snapshot. It's not meant to be a transcription of human speech.
Remember way back when, at the beginning of a seminar, when I compared and contrasted a cell phone
photograph with art. Transcribing audio, just writing speech the way it actually sounds is a cell phone
photo. Is it technically accurate? Yes. Does it describe everything that was said? Yes. Does it give you the
emotional truth and meaning of the scene? No.
Good dialogue tells us not what people said it tells us how it feels to have heard what they said instead.
We don't need to have the exact words transcribed as we hear them. We need to know what it feels like
to have heard them. Now, I find writing dialogue very difficult. Dialogue has to do a lot of things after all.
Dialogue has to reflect the character. Dialogue has to earn its keep. Dialogue, like every other paragraph
in a novel has to do two jobs, character and setting, mood and exposition, and that's just too much
weight for me in the first draft.
So a lot of times when I'm writing the first draft of a chapter, I'll fake the dialogue I'll just put in what's
supposed to happen in the dialogue. They'll say it like, "We're having a fight. I hate you. Expression of
love." It won't be in their voice. It won't take up the right amount of room, but I'll at least know that,
yes, I'm going to go back later and probably they will say something in character that's going to make
that moment amazing, but it's too difficult for me to hold it all in my head. It's like holding that bundle of
balloons, I can only hold onto so many at once, and the good dialogue balloon is not going to come in
the first go round.
Now, some people will tell me, "Oh, that's not me. I am great at writing dialogue. I love writing dialogue.
I write it fast. It's the first thing I do. Look at that. All of that dialogue." Are you writing good dialogue?
And more to the point, are you writing a productive rough draft? Because as you pointed out the
dialogue doesn't have to be good in the first past, but the rough draft should be giving you more
information to work with. If you're just throwing banter back and forth you're not actually solving the
problems on the page, so make sure that when you're writing your fast dialogue and you're feeling good
about it that you're actually getting yourself closer to a draft where you're writing something that's not
just dialogue.
Now, can you write a draft entirely with dialogue? The amount of dialogue in a book is genre
dependent. Generally speaking, dialogue moves us faster through a page. It's shorter. It's faster for the
reader to go through. We don't have to think about it as hard because we're not parsing and imagining
what the description is of setting, or something like that, so we move quickly through dialogue, which
means that a lot of fast paced genres use a lot of it. Romantic comedies, things like that, you'll see a lot
of dialogue on the page because we're supposed to frolic quickly through them. Other genres, however,
use less dialogue, and they use it in a different way.
Imagine Game of Thrones, the amount of dialogue in that. You could tell an entire romantic comedy
basically in dialogue, could you do that with an epic? Technically, you could I suppose, but I think it
would feel more like that World War Z zombie novel where it's told in interviews. If you're trying to do
all the heavy lifting of an epic fantasy with dialogue, your dialogue will have to do all of the work of all of
the other kinds of paragraphs, character descriptions, setting, grounding, taking us there, so it will no
longer function like dialogue. Yeah.
So dialogue, know how much to use, and again, think about what those pages look like at the beginning
of the section. Look at pages of the genre that you are writing in and compare and contrast how you're
using dialogue versus how they're using dialogue, how much of it appears on every single page.
Let's talk, mood, mood and dialogue. The amount of dialogue and what the dialogue says still has to
obey that overarching rule of mood in one of my novels an example of this is the Scorpio Races. Now
,with the Scorpio Races, I wanted it to feel like a novel that had existed forever, like a dusty, old,
traditional tone that you found under your mother's bed, or that you were assigned for school. You
didn't expect that you would like it, and yet, oh, actually, secretly you're really into this assigned reading.
I wanted you to feel like it was unearthed. Now, a lot of dialogue on a page to me often feels quite
modern, it can feel like banter, so I made a challenge to myself and the Scorpio Races to use as little
dialogue as possible. Now, looking back at the way the Scorpio Races actually turned out it looks like a
pretty normal amount of dialogue, but because I had that operating in the back of my head, because I
was telling myself, "All right, remember, use as little dialogue as possible," it meant that when I did use
dialogue it tended to have more weight to it. Instead of it ever coming back and forth, and being
flippant, and bantery it all obeyed the mood of the Scorpio Races.
There's another kind of dialogue that you can use that does not involve quotation marks that's about
avoiding dialogue, and it's this. Putting dialogue into indirect speech instead. This never occurred to me
when I was an aspiring writer. I would need to convey information between characters and I would
struggle to have a character tell another character what they needed to do with the plan, or something
like that, and end up with these long pages of extremely boring dialogue that were barely in character
where they described the workings of their future plans, which was just awful. It was absolutely awful.
Now I understand that there is a wonderful way to work around this, and it's this. They murmured
quietly in the back seat. It revolutionized my life. Maybe you already know this tip and trick, but for me
it never occurred to me that I could just skip it, that I could just say they talked over the plan. If I don't
need to know exactly how they're saying it, if it's only doing one job, which is exposition, I don't need to
put it into dialogue if it's not going to tell me something about how they feel about it. No, I'm just going
to skip over it. I'm going to read you a section from Blue Lily, Lily Blue, to show you a time that I
struggled with dialogue and found out that the solution to it was just this, taking it out of quote marks.
As some background, you should know that there's a character in Blue Lily, Lily Blue, named Jesse
Dittley. He's an enormous giant of a man, and all of his dialogue is expressed in all caps to indicate that
he has a deep and booming voice. Now, in this scene he's talking to Blue Sergeant who was not a giant,
she has normal voice, but they're supposed to be discussing the terms of a curse that his family is
experiencing, and I could not find a way to make this take up the right amount of space on the page.
Every time I tried to write out this dialogue Blue sounded out of character or there was so much caps
lock on the page that it just looked like I was shouting at the reader. It was just awful. I wrote it again,
and again, and again, deleted, deleted, deleted.
I was at wit's end. I knew what had to happen in this chapter. I knew that they had to convey the terms
of this curse to the reader. Why couldn't I write it? Eventually I came up with the following solution.
Now you'll notice on this page, the all caps of Jesse Dittley.
"Sleepers, he replied, there are things sleeping under these mountains," et cetera, et cetera. So that's
what the dialogue looked like normally between the two of them. Now imagine four pages of that.
That's pretty aggressive, all caps, and just so much, so much space for just describing a curse. What I
eventually ended up with was on the following page.
"With a sigh he fetched a big book of photographs. The Dittley family album. It was the kind of
experience Blue always suspected would be charming and intriguing. An insightful and secret peek into
another family's past. It was not that. It was very boring. But in between the stories of birthdays that
went as you'd imagine and fishing trips that happened as fishing trips do another story appeared: a
family, living at a mouth of a cave where something slept so restlessly that it peered out through
mirrors, and through eyes, and fuzzed through speakers, and sometimes made children tear wallpaper
off the walls, or wives rip out handfuls of their own hair. This restless sleeper got louder and louder
through a generation until finally a Dittley went into the cave and gave himself to the dark. Later, the
rest of the family took out his bones and enjoyed another few decades of peace and quiet. And then
there were some more photos about the Dittley's building a car port."
So this accomplishes all of the information that I needed out of that dialogue without the dialogue, so if
you're struggling to get a conversation right ask yourself, do I actually need a conversation?
I want to talk briefly about dialogue tags. He said, she said, they commented. I think that there are a lot
of rules about dialogue tags out there, but I generally think of them more as pirate guidelines. I generally
think of all of dialogue rules as pirate guidelines. Really, I only have four big rules for dialogue tags,
who's speaking should be clear, said is invisible, chuckled and laughed are not dialogue tags, and an
action item is often better than using a dialogue tag.
Now, who's speaking should be clear. I hate those long stretches of dialogue where they get rid of
dialogue tags eventually, and I'm supposed to remember that it's every other person shooting it back.
That's impossible. No. I'm only going to use that for a short period of time. Said as an invisible dialogue
tag, I don't need something new. Even if it said, he said, she said, he said, she said 8,000 times before in
the draft I'm still fine to use said again, and again, and again. I don't need to switch to whispered, or
hissed, et cetera, et cetera, to change things up. Said is the default. Said is invisible. I'm only going to use
hissed or whispered if it's actually something for emphasis.
Now, likewise, I'm not going to use a word that's not speaking for a dialogue tag. I'm not going to say I
wish I was over there. He laughed because you don't speak while laughing. It just pulls the reader right
out of it. No chuckled. Well, I mean, chuckle is a terrible word anyway, nobody should use the word
chuckle, but those are not dialogue tags. Instead, you can say "He laughed, and then he said," split them
up. And then, finally, an action item can often tell us who's speaking, so I don't have to say the word said
anymore.
Let's look at two examples now. All right. This is a little quote from the Scorpio Races. I say, "Someplace I
won't think to look, probably. Do you have any other brothers? Sisters, Brian says. Three of them.
Where are they tonight? The mainland." Notice that there are no dialogue tags on the final two lines,
but because there's not a lot of dialogue, we have no problem understanding that where are they
tonight is being said by Puck, the first speaker, and Brian is the one answering "The main land."
Now, let's head over to the next one. "We'll need to watch the road while it burns, said Lock. Let's make
this quick. The Zed looked at them with detached interest. I understand me, guys, but why Browne? He
was a kitten. What are you afraid of?" Notice that it's obvious that the second group of dialogue is being
said by The Zed. It doesn't say The Zed said, but instead it shows you what he's doing instead.
Wow. That rhymed a lot of Zed, and said, and instead. The point is that if you use an action item instead
of a dialogue tag you can often save some words and move the reader faster through a scene, which is
otherwise dragging a little. It's important to remember that the only rules for dialogue are ones that
allow it to be clear and interesting.
VIDEO 23:
I hate writing action scenes. I hate reading action scenes actually. I even hate action scenes in movies.
No, you know what? All of those things are a lie. No, the first one is true, I really don't like writing action
scenes. I just generally don't enjoy action scenes unless they're also doing something else. I need more
than bombastic running and exploding and car chases, it needs to mean something else. A great action
scene does multiple things. A great action paragraph does multiple things. Right. For me, action scenes,
the reason why they're so difficult is because it's like dialogue. I can't do all of it right in the first pass
and so I have to do it in layers, like a printer that prints yellow and then blue and then pink. Yeah. So for
me, an action scene, often what I'll do is I'll write what happens in the scene so that I know how I'm
moving through space and then I'll ask myself, "All right, how do I make it mean something? What do I
really need to show?"
With action and writing, the difference between an action scene and a book and an action scene and a
movie is that in a movie we see every single movement. We see how they're interacting with the world.
You don't need to direct the character in the same way in a book. And as a matter of fact, it's difficult for
a reader to follow along if you're telling them that they're running across the hall, they're opening the
door, they're going up the stairs. If there's too many steps in between here, we can't picture it in our
head and we just get lost in a thicket of words. Generally speaking, the rules for action scenes are that
you make your sentences shorter than usual, more clear than usual and you try and move the reader
through the scene at the same speed that your character is actually experiencing the scene.
For me, it's genre dependent of course. If you're writing a thriller, probably you need less emotional
content in your action. Probably your genre thriller readers will understand a different idea of what an
action scene is supposed to do. For a Steve Otter novel, it's got to keep carrying that emotional arc
throughout it. So what we're going to do now is we're going to look briefly at an action scene from The
Raven Boys, so that I can show you paragraph by paragraph what it is that I'm doing as I move the
characters through this action scene.
The scene that I'm about to show you from The Raven Boys is a pretty straightforward one. Remember I
told you videos and videos ago that the how you told the story is just as important as the story itself.
The story of this is straightforward. "Once upon a time, there were four boys in a pizza restaurant, one
of them was Ronan. He went outside to where his older brother was waiting for him and they got into a
fight, a fist fight about Ronan's grades and their father." That's a pretty short story, straightforward, but
the telling is what makes it into not only a Steve Otter novel, but also to fit in this novel and also to fit in
this place.
Depending on where it actually occurred in this manuscript, I might want it to move faster or move
more slowly. But right here, I want to use it to do multiple things at once. This is pretty early on in The
Raven Boys, in the Raven Cycle in general and we have a lot to learn about Ronan. We have a lot to learn
about whether or not we sympathize with Ronan and this scene was important for understanding not
only that, but also Gansey's relationship to him.
So you'll notice here, if you're looking at this scene that the actual action of the scene, the fist fight,
starts with "The swing was infinite." Now a fist fight can take place in no time at all, right? We could just
say "They scuffled." Remember I said before that with dialogue for instance, you could just say, "They
murmured in the backseat." You could say, "Ronan and Declan had a brief fight." Or "For 20 minutes,
they dragged each other around the parking lot." But instead we go on for pages and pages, because the
fistfight is an excuse to talk about other things.
Now, this introduction here where I set the cinematic scene, slows down the timing so that we
understand that this is going to be a more folkloric moment. This is going to be a "Once upon a time".
This is a, "All right, children pull up a chair, we're going to tell you a story." Because after that, the fist,
which is the introduction, takes us to a memory of the Lynch Brothers getting lessons from their father,
which is cuing us into what this fight might actually be about. Now we're fighting, we're fighting. You see
that we have a proper action paragraph here. Look at this, "Arms windmill, knees met chests, elbows
rammed into faces." You see how these are short, punchy sentences that are bringing us through the
actual, very fast clipped action of a fistfight.
Now notice then though we go and slide back into our folkloric tale. "The story of the Lynch family was
this>" And it tells you some backstory using the fistfight to drag you through the story. Now if I had
paused in giving you this backstory, when it was already a slow moment, it would've made a slow
moment even slower, but instead I get to kind of modulate the pacing because I'm using an action scene
as an excuse to tell you about the past.
Now you'll notice we go through a whole week to bring us through it. The nice thing about this, which is
not really about an action moment, this is more of a pacing moment, but look at how it says it was a
Wednesday on Thursday, on Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, on Monday. The reason why I use this
device is because it's the same as that oral presentation method. I'm saying I'm going to talk about A, B
and C; A, B, and C. We understand that we're moving our way through this flashback by the days of the
week. And it gives us less restlessness as we're going through it. All right, now we go back to punching
people across the Volvo. Now we get to look a little bit at how Gansey relates to Ronan, "Someone
would be unconscious before Gansey had time to cry havoc and he just didn't have time to take
someone to the ER tonight."
Notice that's a throwaway line indicating that perhaps in the past Gansey has taken someone to the ER.
All right. Action scene, action scene, action scene, "So it was Gansey who got Declan's blow, something
went and misted his arm. He was fairly certain, it was spit, but it was possible it was blood." So notice
again, clipped fast sentences, bring us through the actual action. Now we begin to slow the scene down
and bring it to a gradual conclusion that's more emotional by introducing longer sentences and also
starting to bring in a more obvious emotional moment. And yeah, so what we've done with this action
scene is that I've used it to contain a slower moment. And to me, that's what is great about an action
scene.
I don't really care about seeing blow for blow, these two characters punch each other. I want to know
what it means for these two characters to punch each other and if I can also use this scene to get a little
bit of a backstory in there, and some other character interpersonal relationships, I'll feel like it's a win.
But this is the reason why action scenes take me three times longer to write than anything else, I feel
like I want to justify their existence three times more than any other chapter.
The last thing I want to say about action scenes is that I often break the rules in them. I will do whatever
it takes to make an action scene actually feel like it's worthwhile to me. And that means often I'll play
with prose, I'll play with structure, I'll do anything. It's like dialogue, whatever it takes to make it exciting
and concise and clear, I'm there. I am there for it. I want to show you a sample of one of my early short
stories. That is an action scene, where you can see that I break the rules of prose within it in order to
pull us right through the story.
Step one. Drag his body away from the window. He might not be dead, so try not to hit his head off the
coffee table. Don't worry about the stuff his hands leave behind as they drag on the carpet. The carpet
of a history department's sitting area has suffered far worse insults than that stain.
Step two. Go to the staff room. That feeling in your throat means you need water. Yes, it's important.
More important than checking to see if the door to the history department is locked. After all, doors
didn't help Frazier. You really need water.
Step three. Ignore your thirst because you really, really need to see the door is locked. Even if it doesn't
help, it will make you feel better. You will not die of thirst in the next two minutes. You could possibly
die from what killed Frazier before then. When you find the door is already locked, remember the
window behind Frazier and realize that the door is not your problem.
Step four, return to the scene. Step on Frazier's outstretched hand and say the worst swear word you
know (it's four letters and rhymes with 'grunt') because swearing has to be better than screaming. Note
that he is making more stains on the carpet. Try not to look at his face. He does not look like Sarah's
brother anymore, and you don't need to be reminded. Oh, right, and get off his hand, just in case he is
still alive.
This short story goes through all of the various steps that take us to the end of it. Because they are
there, step one, step two, step three, step four, they serve the same purpose as Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday on the action scene in The Raven Boys. It's that same technique of what
I'm going to talk about, A, B and C. Now I'm talking about A, B and C. Unusual structure can often make
an action scene seemed more brisk.
VIDEO 24:
I said earlier that the how a story is told is just as important as the story itself. And I'm here to tell you
that the why the story is told is just as important as the how the story is told. What does it mean for
your character to be moving through this narrative? Now we have tools for that and it's internal action,
it's characters ruminating on how they feel about the situation at hand. There's two different ways to do
this, depending on if it's first person or third person. First person, of course, we're already in their head.
So we get to see directly what they are thinking, which on the surface seems quite straightforward. Take
out this example of Sam thinking about something in the Shiver series. "I had planned a thousand
different versions of this scene in my head, but now that the moment had come, I didn't know what to
do."
In third person, however, because we're not directly in their head, internal thoughts are generally
expressed with italics. "The man relented and accepted the bills, 'I'll get some wrapping paper.' 'You're
really doing this, Declan thought. 'Down the rabbit hole.'" Now using italics can pull the reader out of
the moment, I think. They look different on the page. That game, one of these things is not like the
other, you can immediately see italics popping out at you on the page. So too much of them and you get
a block of very obviously internal thoughts, which is stopping your forward motion. But if I cannot
otherwise see what the character is doing, how they're feeling by their physical actions, I'm going to
drop into the italics to let you know what they're thinking if there's dissonance. So Declan is quite in
control in this scene. There's no way for you to think from the outside as the reader that he's actually
having any kind of crisis of emotion whatsoever. So dropping into italics to say, "Down the rabbit hole,"
is giving you insight that you can't otherwise get from the action prose.
It's important to remember that people are liars. Yeah, we lie all the time. Not on purpose. I mean, some
of us lie on purpose, but most of us lie by accident. Most of us lie to ourselves. Most of us don't realize
how little we understand ourselves. Way back when I told you that story about how I was thinking I was
coping with waiting for medical results, and instead I blew the engine on my car. This happens to all of
us. In fact, the more we feel like we know ourselves and our motivations, probably the worse off we are
going to be because we don't even allow ourselves to consider that we might be incorrect in our
assumptions of ourselves. I'm telling you this because characters are unreliable narrators. And it's
important to build that into the fabric of it.
Now, there's official unreliable narrators. There's narrators that are withholding information from the
reader on purpose for suspense, but there's just the garden variety unreliable narrator as well. If you
have a character that says, "I'm coping," but they're actually not coping, well, they're unreliable, right?
They're saying what they think is the truth. But you as the author understand that it is not true. They are
repressed or whatever. "I'm fine," they say. Narrator voice, "They were not fine." The important thing
when balancing the character's amount of lying to themselves and the character's unreliable view of the
world and the actual truth is that it should be apparent at some point in the book that you, the writer,
actually know what the truth is. Whether it's later they find out, "Oh right, back when I was coping, I was
not actually coping." Or that you have another character point out that that's not the truth, it's
important when you're having characters blend the truth that the reader believes that you, at least,
know what the actual truth is.
Now a last word on internal thoughts and feelings and having characters express their emotion and why
it is that they're doing a thing that they're doing. I often will skip it as much as possible during my rough
draft. This is a very Maggie specific thing. It may or may not work for you. I know it might surprise you to
know that my early drafts are often devoid of emotional motivation, but I know that if I start writing in
emotional paragraphs, internal musings, that very quickly, it becomes overgrown with emotions. It
becomes soapy, it becomes overwrought. I have a much better time in revision adding feelings in than I
do pruning them. Will that be the same for you? I'm not sure. But it's a thing that you learn. The more
drafts that you write, the more you learn if you're going to overwrite emotion or underwrite emotion.
You're never going to get it right on the first try because, remember, we're never perfect on the first try.
But for me, the feels, keep them on the DL.
Man. People love hard and fast rules for writing. They really do. They love saying, "You should always do
this, you should never do this." When in reality, there's very few absolutes in writing. So I don't know
why there's the temptation to have there be rules. Maybe it makes it feel more manageable. I don't
know. But here's one of the rules that I heard all the time when I was growing up and it lodged in my
mind. And it's this, you should never use dream sequences and you should never have flashbacks. Now I
understand the concept of why they're supposed to be bad. The thing about a dream sequence or a
flashback is that they stop the forward motion of the plot, right? You're headed off into a dream. And
what? You're just waiting because the character's body is sleeping unless they're being murdered while
they're sleeping. What's the point of them being dreaming in there?
And then the idea behind a flashback is that, of course, yes, you have to pause the forward motion to
talk about what happened in the past, which theoretically slows down the reader, which is a no-no. But
as we've already talked about before, sometimes you want to slow down the reader. You tap the brakes
in order to control the pacing. The real only rule I think about flashbacks and dreams is that don't use
anything that happened in the past or in a dream unless it also is affecting the present in that moment
or the waking moment. I tried to avoid dreams for as long as possible while I was writing The Raven
Cycle because of this advice, which is a dream does not feel real, it just wastes time. And it was difficult
because Ronan, as a character, pulls things out of his dreams into real life. And not showing those
dreams, it was difficult after a while to not talk about what happened in the dreams.
And then I realized it doesn't matter. I can write dreams just like regular scenes in that context, because
if you can affect the real world with the dreams, then they're no longer functioning as a dream
sequence. They're no longer imaginary, just a pause. Likewise with flashbacks, I am quite happy to use
flashbacks. I use them all the time, as we mentioned. Even in action scenes. The thing is that I try and
make sure that the flashback, A, controls the pacing, and, B, is relevant to the moment at hand. Let's
take a look at a flashback that happens in the Shiver series.
I want you to take a look at this scene. This flashback is kind of what I call an inline flashback. I'm not
stepping completely out of the present moment to talk about what happened in the past. It's not a
chapter that entirely takes place in the past. I don't need to a heading that says, "1984." No, instead
you'll notice that we're in the middle of an action scene again. Grace is trying to convince Sam to get
into a bathtub to warm him up, to keep him from turning into a wolf. So you'll notice that Sam does not
want to do this. We are uncertain of why it is that he does not want to do this. And then as she finally
pushes him towards the tub, he has his flashback, right? It only takes place in a paragraph as he recalls
his parents, trying to kill him in a bathtub. And it's nested within this action scene, an inline flashback
that is relevant to the moment at hand that makes the moment at hand mean more without slowing
down the pacing.
Let's look at another kind of pacing here, a flashback that's more set aside. Now, when you take a
flashback and put it into a chapter of its own, or you take a flashback and you give it a whole lot of
space, it's going to slow the reader down. And I am using it on purpose in this book, Call Down The
Hawk, because we've just had a whole bunch of very exciting, vigorous scenes. And what I want to do is I
want to tell the reader, "Slow down, calm down, think about what just happened." And so to do that, I
go and take this moment and throw us into a flashback that is still doing work, I need to point out.
It's not just giving you exposition. It's giving you emotional truth, it's giving you a thematic truth. It's
setting the scene. It's telling you more about Ronan. And I'm going to use the information and themes of
this flashback, which is where he's talking about taboos and the difference between his parents, later
on. But most importantly, for this flashback, as I said, pulling it out separately like this makes it into a
pacing decision. I'm doing this on purpose. When I first wrote this book, this draft just had a moment
that said, "Slow them down here." I didn't even know what I was going to pull from their past to put in
there. I just knew I wanted to put on the brakes.
Now I'm going to group together three other kinds of paragraphs that are sort of miscellaneous. There's
miscellaneous exposition, there's beginnings and ends, and there's those punctuation paragraphs that I
was talking about. So when I say miscellaneous exposition, I mean anything which is just telling you
information that you can't otherwise get. These paragraphs are necessary. They're often timeframe
related. And I learned them very late in the game, I have to say. I learned them around the same time
that I learned that you could just say things like, "They were murmuring in the backseat." It took me a
very long time to realize that I was allowed to just say, "Four days later, three hours passed," instead of
having to account for every single moment of every single day. Before that, I would have entire books
that took place in a headlong rush through a timeline because I had no idea how to say, "Four days
later." You can just do it. You can just do it.
Don't skip over important parts, obviously, but if it's just time, do it. Just do it. If you feel strange about
taking that time, remember that you can nest that pause with a flashback. Give a flashback, and then
say, "After four days," because then you've set the reader back on their heels and they're waiting.
They're quiet. They've thought about what just happened. And then you can go rushing into the next
thing again. Let's take a look at a sample here from the Shiver series. Chapter eight, Grace. "For the next
week, I was distracted in school, floating through my classes and barely taking any notes." Look at that.
In the old days, Maggie Stiefvater would have tried to account for every single day of that week. What a
time to be alive.
I also want to talk briefly about that temperature up at the top underneath the chapter, because that
was a bit of a rule breaking that's not covered by anything else we're talking about here. I said earlier in
the seminar that the rules of the magic in the Shiver series was that the wolves changed into wolves
when the temperature dropped. So as a method of introducing tension at the beginning of every single
chapter, as the year goes on, I would put the temperature there so that slowly readers could put
together, if they wanted to pay attention there, to the idea that there was a temperature at which most
people turned into wolves and understand, as the book marched on that, we were ratcheting closer to
it.
Beginnings and endings are important. When I was a young college student, a history major, I was
always assigned far more books than I could ever read in that semester. Every single semester I would
go and spend hundreds of dollars on the textbooks, have these massive piles of primary and secondary
sources, and to have to try and make it through hundreds of pages of reading every single week. And it
was just impossible.
Now, at one point, I walked into my advisor's office and I said, "What the snot, O'Brian? What's
happening here? How am I supposed to read all of these books?" And he said, "You're not." You what?
He says, "You have to learn how to read them. You have to learn how to get the most out of them that
you can without reading all of them, because you're never going to be able to read every single historical
source ever. This is a thing that you need to learn." He said, "You need to read the beginnings and the
endings. Read the first paragraph of the book. Or if you can, the whole first chapter. And the last chapter
of the book. This will tell you what they're going to write about and what they just told you they wrote
about. If you have more time, you can read the first paragraph and the last paragraph of all the chapters
in between where they tell you, 'This is what the chapter's about. This is what the chapter's conclusions
were.' And then if you have more time, you can read the first and last sentences of every single
paragraph. This is what this paragraph is about. This is the paragraph, or this is the sentence that tells us
what the paragraph just told you."
Remember, it's like the oral presentation skills, right? I'm going to talk about A, B, C, and D. You talk
about A, B, and C, and then you sum it up. Well, if you don't have enough time to watch the whole thing,
you can just watch the introduction and the conclusion. We write the same way in our novels, or at least
I write the same way in my novels. Not that I want people to be skipping the stuff in between, but the
truth is edges should tell you what's happening in the middle. No, I'm not writing a nonfiction book, I'm
not telling you a thesis, but I'm telling you how to feel about what's happening. I set up the tone of the
chapter with opening, the theme of it, basically, setting your expectations for mood or what you're
looking at. I take you through the chapter. And then at the end, I try and close it in a way that ensures
that you feel the correct way about what just happened. The edges.
Let's look at a first sentence for a chapter about Jordan Hennessy. Chapter 42. "There was a time when
Jordan used to fantasize about living on her own. When she turned 18, the idea of it was like a crush, an
obsession, something that dully ached during the day and frothed her to sleeplessness at night." This
entire chapter is about Jordan not being able to have a life of her own and wanting to have a life of her
own. And it ends with a conversation with the character she is unable to get away from. This opening is
setting expectations for what the chapter is about. Do I write this in the rough draft? Not necessarily.
Sometimes it's useful for me to write a beginning that I've really thought hard about, or establish an end
that I've really thought hard about as a mission statement so that I understand what it is that I want that
chapter to eventually be. But sometimes, I'm just writing what happens and then afterwards, I decide,
what does that mean? And I adjust the beginning and end to match it.
I want you guys to be rule breakers. I want you guys to know the rules, and then I want you to break
them. I want you to understand that storytelling is a nimble thing. Storytelling is as flexible as your
conversation style. Storytelling is like a battlefield. You do what it takes to get the point across. So what
do I mean by these punctuation sentences, these punctuation paragraphs? It's basically anything which
is, I don't know, it's there for the effect. It's there for the lols, as they say. It's there for the humor. It's
there for the pacing. It doesn't quite belong in the grammar or in the story, but I've put it in there
because, as an interjection, I need it. I need it for the pacing. I need it for adjusting the tone. I need it for
surprise. I need it because I just want it.
And this often means that I'm breaking the rules, or it means that I'm including things that you might not
otherwise think of. An example of technically breaking the rules, I guess, I don't know. I have a chapter
that's only a sentence long for effect. I still get fan mail about it. I also, I'm going to show you an
example right here from The Raven Boys of just interjections. These are not important to the story. It's
not truly important to the setting. It doesn't tell you a ton about character, but I need it to break up the
pacing and readjust the tone. It takes place right after that scene that we looked at with the fight
between the brothers in the parking lot. And here is where Adam is giving Gansey the rundown, they're
basically talking out what just happened.
You can see here it joins up to the previous parking lot fight. When Ronan slams the door, he's getting
into a car. And here's Gansey and Adam talking in the parking lot. And you'll notice that there's some
nice character moments here. "In comparison to Ronan, Adam looked clean, self-contained, utterly in
control." Now, here is the part that I'm talking about. This is the punctuation bit. "From somewhere, he
had gotten a rubber ball printed with a SpongeBob logo and he bounced it with a pensive expression."
Now, Adam is going to bounce this SpongeBob ball for the rest of this scene. Is it important that he has a
SpongeBob ball? Not really. But the reason why I put it in there is because it felt to me as I was making
my way through the scene, that it was too heavy and it was too adult. It was too easy to forget because
Gansey was so in control, he was so paternal towards Ronan, and the discussion they were having was
so adult in general, that it was easy to forget that these guys are just, they're just teens trying to cope.
So while they're having this exceedingly adult conversation and winding down at the end of it, here is
Adam and he's got a rubber ball that he is bouncing. And to me, that just punctuates the scene with the
reminder that, right? They're just kids. "Instead of answering, Adam twisted his hand and released the
rubber ball. He'd chosen his trajectory carefully. The ball bounced off the greasy asphalt once, struck
one of the Camaro's tires, and arced high in the air, disappearing into the black. He stepped forward in
time for it to slap into his palm. Gansey made an approving noise."
Now notice that even this paragraph, this silly paragraph, is still doing multiple jobs at the same time,
right? We're sneaking in a bit of setting. We're reminding the reader that is after dark where the Camaro
is, that they're standing on the asphalt. And we're also doing a little bit of character work, right? Gansey
is of course extremely distressed about what has just happened, but you know what? Adam is there
throwing a ball around and Gansey's like, "Nice, man, nice." Punctuation. Breaking the rules, doing what
it takes to making the scene feel like what it's supposed to feel like.
VIDEO 25
I'm about to break down a scene from Call Down the Hawk paragraph by paragraph in exhaustive detail,
but before I do, I wanted to take a moment to talk about building blocks. I know that it can be feeling at
this point quite daunting to work on a novel. There's so many things to be thinking about with every
single line, and it just feels like so much. It can be tempting to start thinking about how indeed you are
building a house with Lego bricks, so I want to back out again. Even though we've been talking about
building things up from the paragraph up, let's talk for a moment about top down again. So the average
young adult novel is what? 80,000 words. When I started about a decade ago, the trend was shorter,
probably around 70,000 words, and it's slowly growing right now to maybe 110,000 words, and 80,000
words is a nice middle ground.
But if you think about 80,000 words, it's a lot of words. Then you start doing that thing where you sit
back and you go, "I need to get 1,200 words done today." I've written 100 words. There's so many more
words to go. It's too easy for me to get paralyzed thinking about it in terms of 80,000 words. Instead,
think about it like this: a chapter is generally, what? 2,000 words? Right around 2,000 words. I mean,
obviously there are exceptions. You can have a 5,000 word chapter. You can have a one sentence
chapter, but 2,000 is a pretty good guess. That means that your 80,000 word novel is now 40 chapters.
That's a pretty nice difference. I mean, you can hold the concept of 40 discrete pieces in your head in a
way that you can't hold 80,000 words.
You can start to chunk together those sequences of 40 chapters. If you go and say, "All right, my goal for
this week is this chapter," then you can start to say, "All right, in 40 weeks, I'll have I'm novel." Or if you
say, "All right, every other day, I'm going to write a chapter," that becomes a thing you can hold in your
head. Especially if you look at it in terms of this thing. Remember that scene breakdown? Right. Look
how I have it set up for 40 scenes, and if I already have kind of brainstormed all of those moments,
those anchor points, that means I have, what? 13 chapters already sorted out. That's not bad. That's
even easier to hold in my head. I just need to make sure that I stack them all together, like I'm building a
snowman made out of acts in the correct order. Escalating snowman, novel writing.
What I want to do now is dissect an entire chapter for you guys, paragraph by paragraph. I've tried to
pick a chapter that stands alone by itself. It introduces a new character. I'm going to try and show you
how I build an arc over that chapter, but I'm not even trying to teach you about what this chapter does
in specific. What I want to teach is how the paragraphs work together, so we're going to go, like I said,
paragraph by paragraph. I know it's a lot. The actual text is in the PDF that comes along with the
seminar, so I encourage you to go back and look at that side by side as well. I'm going to dissect chapter
four of Call Down the Hawk, because as I said, it's introducing a brand new character, so I think it stands
by itself.
Now as a writer, my opinion of what this chapter is supposed to do is threefold. I think it's introducing
Jordan Hennessy. I think it's starting off her subplot, because this is a book, not a movie, so introducing a
new character means I can't just show her face and promise that we'll see her again later. She's got to
be doing something. Then thirdly, I wanted to write something that would indicate her individual
character arc. That would suggest what her conflict might be later. Now as a writer, that's what I think
this chapter is about, but what readers will think when they read this chapter is that it's about Jordan
trying to get into the ferry market.
Remember I showed you that slide of three act structure that had internal and external action on it?
External is what readers will think every chapter and every book is about. Internal is often what I think
the book is about, what I think the chapters purposes. Often I will conceive of a chapter first with that
internal arc, but I cannot start writing it until I have that external framework. It's not enough for me to
know that I want to introduce the Jordan. I have to know what that looks like.
All right, paragraph one. We start with dialogue. We start with dialogue that's pulling a lot of weight,
actually. Notice it tells us where it takes place, Washington, D.C. Tell them that it's a party, right? The
host of the party, and then it indicates TJ Sharma, the host of the party. Right after that, after we've kind
of set the flippant mood and told us where we are big picture, paragraph two goes straight to a
description of the protagonist of our chapter. We want to do that right away, because we want to
ground the reader in who it is that we're seeing this chapter through, so Jordan gets a description of
herself, which you'll notice is unemotional truth of who she is.
We go to paragraph three, and then that little section there, which is just some brief banter back and
forth. This is light, and it's humorous. The job here is because I want the reader on Jordan's side almost
immediately. Remember I said that humor is quite sympathetic. It's not enough to really pull the reader
through, but you know what? I want them to think, "All right, she's okay. She's funny. She's looking at
the world with a sunny side up kind of atmosphere." Right.
Then the final paragraph on this page is setting description, because I'm trying to ground the reader as
much as possible so that they feel comfortable and safe for the rest of the action. I need them to know
where we are. I need them to know whose eyes looking at the world through, and I need them to
understand what kind of setting that's playing out on, so we are getting a bit more description of the
party. It's not a cool party. It's not a hip party. We're in the suburbs. This is not a specific description,
again, of what this house looks like. You can't draw a map of it, but readers should have a good idea of
what kind of house it is.
All right, page two. Here we have Jordan with a bit more dialogue. Now, I could have made this into
action, but I just gave them a whole chunk ... Or description. Description is slow. Dialogue is fast, so
instead of having her indicate in prose that she wants folks to come closer and pay attention to what
she's doing, instead, I put it into dialogue. We move through it quickly.
All right. Paragraph two on page two is, "Jordan was attending this party as Hennessy. No one here
knew the real Hennessy, so there was no one to say she wasn't. Even TJ knew her as Hennessy." This is a
paragraph of description, but it is also a question. This is something to intrigue the reader about Jordan.
It's information, but it doesn't really give you the whole picture. It's important to know that when you're
putting out backstory reveals, et cetera, et cetera, sometimes the ankle is better than the leg. Now,
because I slowed things down with some just plain old description, you'll notice I go next to dialogue.
"'You're going to love this,' TJ told the others." Now I tell us a little bit about the relationship between TJ
and Jordan. To, again, ground us here, we find out that they used to date it looks like. Then we also get
to see a little bit of backstory flashback time in paragraph number four. "They had met on the streets of
D.C. just a few weeks after Hennessy and Jordan had first arrived in the area." Okay, check out how
much information we're getting in this sentence, right? Not only have we discovered how Jordan meets
people on the streets of D.C., but we've also understood in a very aside way that Jordan has only been
here for a while. Also, the reader is still wondering, what is the relationship between Jordan and
Hennessy? Why is she pretending to be Hennessy? It's a question, but again, it is not answered.
Remember that satisfaction comes from the exquisite release of tension, and that comes from delivering
information as well. No, you don't want to withhold necessary information, but you know what? They
don't need to know everything right away. Right? Make them wait.
Okay. So then there's some paragraphs here that describe how they met, again, on the streets, and how
they raced on the streets, and how she ended up with his car. Now notice the shape of these
paragraphs. Notice that it's not just this happened, this happened, this happened. Instead, it's full of the
voice of the book. Those last three paragraphs: "His, a souped up Toyota Supra. Hers, a souped up old
Challenger. He'd." We only returned to traditional grammar really in paragraph form after we've taken a
moment to kind of shake things up. What am I doing with that structure? What I'm doing is I'm keeping
the reader from getting bored as I throw a lot of backstory at them. I'm tricking them into thinking I'm
still telling them a story, because I'm using my storytelling voice.
Page three. Now we see that Jordan has actually ended up with TJ's car, and again, this as sympathy to
Jordan. It adds intrigued to Jordan because we think it's funny that they met and now they dated,
because she ended up winning his car in a grudge match. We're kind of starting to like this chock, right?
Because remember there's another way to make people like characters, which is competence and who
we sort of like that she kicked his ass and took his car, right? All right, but now you'll notice paragraph
two, we need to head back into some dialogue because I took a break for half of a page to give us
backstory. It's time to move back into present.
"'The key to proper forgery,' Jordan told the party goers, 'is to remember you can't copy it, the
signature. The curves and the flourishes will look stilted. Everything will end in hard stops instead of
trailing off prettily. Okay, I hear you say. So I'll trace it. No way. Trace it, the lines will wobble their way
from bed to pub and back. Any amateur who looks close can tell if a signature has been traced. But
Hennessy, I hear you say, what else is there? You have to internalize the organic structure of it, don't
you? You have to get the architecture in your hand. You have to have the system of shapes memorized.
Intuition, not logic.'"
This is a specific bit of dialogue that not only speeds us through the scene because it's dialogue, but also
it's telling us that Jordan is good at something else, and that is deeply sympathetic. Jordan is good at
forging things. Not only is that making us feel sympathy for her, but also it's making us think we have
more questions about this girl, actually. So she's pretending to be someone else, she meets peoples in
grudge matches, she drives stolen cars, and she's an art forger. Hmm. What's going on?
All right, next paragraph. The one that begins with, "As she spoke. "As she spoke, she rapidly drew
signatures and random letter combinations over and over." Notice that this is both action and
grounding. "She barely looked at her work as she did, her eyes entirely on the party goers' handwriting."
This is actually a bit of setting. This is to pause us in the moment and have us look at what the scene
really looks like. We're imagining now this girl leaned over and copying party goers' handwriting. Also,
notice that there's dialogue at the end of this. No dialogue tag, because the action makes it obvious that
she is the one talking.
All right, next paragraph. "Jordan had homed in on just one of the handwriting samples: 'The quick
brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,' signed with the unusual name, Breck Myrtle. It was an angular
signature, which was easier than a fluid one, and he had a few really good specific ticks in his
handwriting that would make the trick satisfying for onlookers." This paragraph tells us not only is she
good at it, it tells us what she's doing, but also it tells us more about her, because, yes, this is something
she's good at. Yes, it's vaguely criminal, but yes, she kind of loves it. It would make the trick satisfying for
onlooker. She's a performer.
Next paragraph. "Flipping the paper over to hide her scratchings. She confidently wrote one last set of
words on the blank expanse. 'I deed over all my possessions on this day in November to the most
fabulous Hennessy.' Then she signed it flawlessly, Breck Myrtle. Jordan pushed the paper to the party
goers for their assessment." This collection of paragraphs, this two paragraph section here at the end of
it, what do I want to say about it? I want to tell you about how this is one of those breathing moments I
was telling you about. We set up the scene. Here is a girl who was at a party. She is performing for these
party goers. She's not like them. She's good at it.
What is the purpose of it? We're asking questions, asking questions, asking questions, and this is the
first time that we really reach a resting point. This is a little tiny sequence within this chapter. We've let
out a tiny bit of tension. What is she doing? She is forging their signatures and their letters. It gives us
another question at the same time though, right? Because if she can do this, what else could she do?
Next page. "There were delighted noises, laughs, a few sounds of mock dismay." Please notice that this
paragraph could be full of dialogue. I could have all of these party goers actually say delighted things,
but guess what? We don't actually care about them, right? They're just random people, so let's just
make them into background noise. They make delighted noises and laughs, mock dismay. The only one
we need to actually put into dialogue tags is Breck Myrtle, the guy who was just forged, and in the next
paragraph, we do. Notice that there is one other woman who gets to reply back to them. "She's got you,
Breck. That's perfect." And then finally TJ says, "Isn't she scary?" But obviously he's kind of a fan, right?
He invited the forger to the party after all right.
Next paragraph. Okay, now we dig into Jordan's personal life. We've won the pacing to dig in here
because we've gone through some fun action, and we've got a reveal, so they had the satisfaction of the
reveal of what she was doing, and we had some brisk moving dialogue, so now we can rest with this
paragraph. "None of them had seen the scariest bits of her, not by a long shot. If Breck Myrtle kept
talking, Jordan could have learned to predict his way of using language too. Forgery was a skill
transferable to many media, even if she generally used them more in her personal than business life."
Hmm. This here has started to give us an idea of how Jordan might be more than just someone who
performs things at parties.
All right, we move briskly through some dialogue. "You're so young for crime. She's just coming into her
powers," et cetera, et cetera. Now we've earned another backstory. "But Jordan had been pretty well
into her powers for a while. Both she and the real Hennessy were art foragers. The other girls in their
house dabbled in it, but they were more properly copyists. Jordan found there was a tendency to
misunderstand, to conflate art forgers with copyists." Now, I want to point out that this huge long
section of backstory, this is a big paragraph on the page. It's earned because at this point we've been
moving briskly through the present moment. We've been taking the reader through a scene, and instead
of feeling like they will want more of that and more of that and more of that, if we pause and give more
context backfill in more of who Jordan is, it will mean more when we move on again. Just again, that
breathing, that organic rhythm of putting together a chapter.
All right, at the end of this page, we see the next bit of tension. "A doorbell ring cut through the 90s
music." Notice it sits all by itself. Let's move to the next page for a second, because we can see this
sentence also sits all by itself. "Jordan's heart flopped with anticipation." Those two sentences stuck
together indicate that we are moving on. Imagine this chapter plugged on top of that structure of three
act structure. What we've just done for the first couple of pages is we've established who Jordan is.
We've established normal, and now we're basically breaking normal. The doorbell has rung. We're
beginning to leap into the quest. Does every chapter fit perfectly into this kind of miniature three act
structure? No, but it's still, again, remember that natural breathing pattern of beginning, middle and
end. What is a chapter, but a beginning, middle and end?
So here we are. Who's at the door? Next paragraph. TJ says, "Bernie." He tells us right away. "You don't
have to ring the bell like a stranger." This is a clever bit of dialogue, because guess what, now we know
that it's someone that TJ knows, and we can wonder what their relationship is. All right, turns out Jordan
knows who it is too, because we've got some backstory. "Jordan was still friendly with TJ, but she
wouldn't have partied with his more boring friends without an ulterior motive, and here the motive was:
a woman in a smart purple pant suit and tinted round glasses: Bernadette Feinman." All right, so we get
a description of Bernadette, and you'll notice that the description, as I've said, not only tells us
something about her, it tells us something about how Jordan thinks about her, and it also uses language
that perfectly sets up the mood of the scene.
All right, and it also ends with plot, right? "Unknown to probably everyone else in the room. Feinman
was also one of the gatekeepers for the DC ferry market, a rotating global underground black market
that traded in all sorts of prestigious, illegal goods and services. Emphasis on prestigious." Now, we see
why Jordan is really here. "Jordan wanted in. She needed in. Bernadette Feinman would decide." Now
we understand the stakes of this chapter. This is the place where readers understand, first of all, we've
met Jordan. Now we know what we want for Jordan. We understand the rules of the chapter. The
reader will be expecting for you to make a decision by the end of the chapter. It would be a very strange
shape to end without letting us know whether or not Jordan made it in.
All right. "Feinman stepped deeper into the house. She had a creaky particular way of walking like a
mantis, but when she spoke, her voice was soft and melodic." Notice this paragraph doesn't have a
dialogue tag. Instead, it doesn't waste the time on he said, she said. It just shows us what Feinman is
doing. Next paragraph where TJ presses a drink into her hand is, again, setting the scene, but also
describing the relationship between TJ and Feinman, because, really, even though there's lots of people
in this room, there's only a few characters in this scene. There's Jordan, there's TJ, there's Feinman, and
then maybe off to the side is Breck Myrtle. So really, we're just looking again and again at the spaces
between those characters.
All right, we move to dialogue for the last paragraph on this page. "This is Bernie, guys. She's my Yoda,
my mentor. So let's drink to our elders." All right, the party goers drank to their elders and then they
turned on the PS2. You know why I did this? I don't want them around. I want to zoom more intimate
for the next section. I don't need people watching this. No, get out of here, go play the PS2. Like I said, I
don't need their dialogue to agree. I'm just going to send them off.
Next page. All right. I want you to take a look at this page. Actually, before we dive in, I want you to look
at how short these things are. This is not just dialogue, but even the descriptions are shorter. I'm trying
to move people more quickly through this. This is the second act part of this chapter, fun and games,
right? We're having them dance around each other. Feinman and Jordan are discovering what the
other's measure is. All right, so we see that Feinman is not impressed with what Jordan is doing. "'So
you're Hennessy.'" Is she really? "'Surely this isn't all you've got." Jordan flashed a huge grin at her, her
world-eating green, full of confidence and goodwill, no sign of nerves or how important this was to her."
I want to take a moment to talk about how we talked before about internal thought. Here it is there.
Remember how I said in third person, you're going to need third or internal thought if what the
character is doing doesn't match how they're feeling. Jordan is grinning here. The reader has no way of
knowing how she feels about the grin, so I have to tell the reader that there's no sign of nerves or how
important this was to her.
All right, let's send TJ off, right? He doesn't know what's going on with Bernie. Feinman lies about it, and
they send TJ off to go and get some more wine. Off they go. All right, here we are. "Clacking silver
painted nails on Breck's forged signature, Feinman cut through the bullshit. 'I trust I'll be looking at more
than party tricks.' 'These are candy bars at the cashier,' Jordan said. 'Don't mistake them for an entree.'"
This is just banter back and forth. But it's banner that tells us about Jordan. Jordan can carry herself in
this. Even though she's scared out of her mind and she really wants this, she's still a performer.
So Feinman sends her off. Here we go. We're slowing down, taking a moment that we've earned at the
bottom of this page after all of this fast dialogue. "Jordan's grin vanished the moment she wound out
into the cold November. For a moment, she studied herself by looking at the Supra on the curb she'd
won it from at the way the suburban houses behind it were lit by washes of porch and garage lights, the
way the car slept quietly in the half light between skeletal fall trees." Notice that pacing wise, what I'm
doing is I run you through this action scene, a miniature action scene, the miniature banter back and
forth between her and the wolfish Feinman, who is waiting to see if she can go into the ferry market.
I'm asking you to pause, to think about it, to realize how important this is to Jordan, and in this
paragraph, let's move to the next page. You can see that it also tells us more about how Jordan sees the
world. It's not just about the setting of the suburb, but notice that it says, "She thought about how she'd
paint this neighborhood, where should place the focal point, what she would emphasize, what she
would push back into obscurity. She thought of how she'd make it art." One of the things that makes us
love characters is specificity, so the fact that she's competent, the fact that she's funny, and the fact that
she is a specific human should be working at this point to get the reader on her side.
All right. "She pulls her paintings from the car and heads back inside." Now, notice I don't direct her
when I'm taking her inside. She doesn't walk back up the walk. She doesn't open the door knob. I just
skip to inside. "She laid her goods on the dining room table." There is a version of me in the past that
would have felt the need to have her play out all of her actions that actually got her back inside. I don't
need it. I just put her back inside. Inside. All right, she puts down these paintings. They're forgeries of
famous paintings, and there's also a Mona Lisa with Jordan's tattoos. I'm not saying that this is like
painting copies of the old masters with the heads of cats on it. But I am saying that maybe we should
remember that write what you know is sometimes pretty fun.
All right, we're moving through fun and games again. These next couple of paragraphs are all about the
reaction to these forgeries, which are clearly good. The party goers are impressed. Is Feinman impressed
with them. "Feinman leaned close to study the important parts, the edges of canvases and boards,
marks on backs, textures, brushwork, pigments used. She wasn't going to find a fault." This is, again,
grounding us. If we went blowing through from, "'You're scary,' TJ said. 'You can really look like anyone,
can't you?'" Imagine we take out that Feinman description and we instead go straight to, "'What does
your art look like?' Feinman asked." It has a different level of pacing. It fails to show us how weighty this
moment is. We want Feinman to be really luxuriating over these copies. We want Jordan to really be
suffering over the wait.
Now, this next little pair of paragraphs, "What does your own art look like?" And, "A lady never tells,"
this is telling us what Jordan's central character arc is going to be. Jordan didn't know this is what her
own art looks like. She spent all her time painting other people's. Oh, huh. Funny how she doesn't say
anything about that, the reader notes. I wonder how she feels about that. All right, next paragraph.
"I think it must be pretty spectacular. Feinman and her clove cigarette move close to the parody Mona
Lisa." Now, notice again, there are no dialogue tags. We don't need it. We're sure that Feinman is the
one who says it. Now, "Jordan held her breath." Notice I don't put anything else around this. I'm moving
people through this scene quickly, but also I want you to notice that Jordan is, for the first time, really
showing physically that she is uncertain about this moment. All right, next page.
Does she get the job? Right. "A long pause." The reason why there's this paragraph here is because I
want the long pause. This is the suspense. Does she get the job? We don't get to know yet, because first
we have to go through this paragraph. "Feinman turned her mantis body towards Jordan and peered
with the same intense gaze she'd previously used on the copies." So we're holding the reader in place.
Feinman delivers her verdict. "'Sometimes," Feinman said, "You have to turn someone down because
they're too qualified. You don't want to hold them back from who they're meant to be.'"
Now, you'll notice the next line after that is, "It took Jordan a beat to realize that she was being told no."
In order for that beat to work, you have to make sure that Fireman's dialogue actually is confusing
enough that the reader too has to take a beat to notice that Jordan is being told no. Now slowly, oh,
they feel the disappointment that Jordan didn't get in, and then we have a character moment. "'I'm
doing you a favor,' Feinman said. She cast a last look at the Mona Lisa. 'You might not know it yet, but
you're meant for originals, Hennessy.'" And then remember I told you, beginnings and ends. We're
trying to tell you what this chapter is about, how you're supposed to feel about it, and there it is: "If only
any part of that sentence had ever been true."
VIDEO 26:
Back when I first began my career one of the questions that I often got asked by interviewers was, "Do
you think you'll ever write a book that's not a fantasy? A book without magic?" I would laugh and just
immediately say, "No. No, no, no." I've learned now to never say no to questions like that, because
when you do the opposite it just makes you look like an idiot. But, it's worth looking at why I said no so
immediately, because it's true. I'm always drawn to stories about magic, stories about myths, stories
with that heightened moment. And really, my reason for that is two-fold.
The number is that, I love stylized stories. I love stories that are obviously a version of reality. I want to
read a story that feels like it's being interpreted, and generally the more you impose genre upon
something, the more obvious that it's not real. It's a stylized version of reality, I'm watching someone
else's vision of the truth. To me, that's escape. That's comforting, that's what I like to dive into, and
that's what I like to tell.
The other reason why I like magic is because magic and myth make things universal, particularly myth.
Let's talk briefly about the difference between those two things. Magic is like the system of fantasy. It's
the rules, it's the unicorns, it's the creatures, it's the manifestations, the details. Myth is, myth is story
with magic in it. Myth is in many cases, the fan fiction of history. It's the truth, but bigger. It's the truth,
but stylized. It's the truth, but made into metaphor, and that is why I think I'm drawn to fantasy and to
myth. Myth makes everything universal.
I'll give you an example, when I was reading old Welsh folktales, and old Welsh mythology for The Raven
Cycle, I read a lot of it when I was a history major and I just returned to it again. I found an old story that
was about a Welsh king, and I'm never going to be able to remember the name of it. This Welsh king was
beloved by his people in this story. He was also a giant. Nobody had a problem with it because that's
how they rolled back then. They were just like, "Oh yeah, you're a giant. He's a big guy. Awesome, cool.
Can't fit into any houses, but you know, who needs to fit into houses?"
Anyway, so the king was a giant, he was larger than life, literally. And, his people loved him. They
couldn't do anything without him. At one point the Welsh were fighting the Irish. I don't remember what
they were fighting over, probably it was about cows. In these old stories, it was always about cows.
Anyway, they were fighting about cows and they got into this battle with the Irish. The Irish started to
escape, they fled over a river, and the river flooded, and the Welsh could no longer follow them. So
what were they going to do? Were they going to give up? No, what they did was they had their king
come over, he led them. He laid down across the river because he was a giant, and they rode their
horses over his back, and caught up with the Irish.
What I love about this story is that it's true. It's true because the king was larger than life, literally. We
know this is true because he was a giant. We know that they needed him. We know that they needed
him in order to defeat the Irish. We can tell because they literally made him into a bridge, and rode
across him to fetch the Irish. So all of the details have been scrubbed from this story, but the emotional
truth has been encapsulated hundreds of years later by myth, by making it bigger than life. That's what I
think myth continues to do. It allows us to make our personal stories more universal.
When I took the werewolf myth and made it about identity. When I wrote Shiver, a story about people
giving away their identity, and losing their identity by turning into wolves. For me, it was about a very
specific thing. I told you the story about how it was inspired by those kids at the high school. But, once
that book came out, it took on life elsewhere. I get letters from all over the world talking about how at
the sad part of that book when finally the battle for identity is lost, that the reader began to weep.
And then they tell me amazingly, what story means to them. They say, "Yes, this story moved me
because it reminded me of losing my brother to addiction. It reminded me of losing my mother to
Alzheimer's. It reminded me of losing my best friend as she became a different person." Once you take a
true story and transform it into myth, it can be translated back into truth again, and that is the power of
myth. That's what you get when you really dig into the why of a story, and that is what I'm looking for
when I put magic back on top of things.
Magic. Magic rules. Magic rules should be real, and magic rules should be simple, right? Yeah, all right,
let's talk about real first. What do I mean by real? It's magic, right? How can it be real? I mean magic, the
rules should be true. That's what makes it feel real to the reader. That's what allows them to turn it into
myth, and then back into reality. The Scorpio Races for instance, the magic there is real, and let me tell
you what I mean.
Well, I already described to you what The Scorpio Races was about. It's about these horses that come
out of the ocean every November, and they are amazing horses if you catch them. And if they catch you,
they kill you. Now, this story resonated with me when I was a kid. I read it when I was very small in a big
book called The Encyclopedia of Fairies. It was everything supernatural, from A to Z, that could kill you
as of the time of writing. I loved it. I checked it out again, and again, and again. And when I got to the
entry on the water horse I thought, "That's it. That's it. I love this story."
Yeah, I love it. It just stuck with me, and the reason why it stuck with me is because I was a horse girl.
Not as much of a horse girl as some of my friends. Some of my friends are pretty much on their way to
being centaurs. I was just really into all living creatures, and I was really into horses as they are living
creatures. But, I desperately wanted a horse. Now, my parents told me that I could have a horse as long
as I learned to take care of it myself, I built a fence for it myself, and I earned the money for a horse
myself.
Now, I don't know what kind of work ethic you had as a child, but even though I had a pretty good one, I
worked all summer, couldn't really earn a whole lot of money. The only horse I could afford to buy at the
end of it was this fresh off the race horse retired horse named Bella. Now, I don't know if you've ever
ridden a retired race horse, but the thing about American race horses is that they spend their entire lives
running around a track in one direction, and just because they get retired, that they don't feel like
stopping. No. Riding Bella was less about my skills as a horse woman, and more about my relationship
with God as I would just climb onto her back, and go through every single prayer I knew as she ran me
through neighbors yards, under tree branches, and my favorite, into complete strangers garages. Yeah,
what a horse. She always went faster turned to the left too.
You think I'm joking? I'm not joking. But I loved her. I loved that horse. She was probably going to kill me
before I made it all the way through puberty, but I loved her. That was the story of The Scorpio Races,
that's the story of water horses. The idea of horses that were dangerous, but that you loved them
anyway, that's the meaning of The Scorpio Races. But, most people aren't going to feel that way about
horses. Most of the time they'll look at a horse and say, "Mm-hmm (affirmative), murder cow. None of
it, I'm fine, I'll skip."
How to demonstrate to them the love of a horse then? How about making the horse magical, giving the
horse mystical allure, making them into a magical, wonderful creature? That is something that even a
not horse person can appreciate. That has mystery to it, that has charisma to it, that makes it more than
a murder cow and something like magic. I brought my love of something deadly and natural, to The
Scorpio Races, heightened it by making it magical. And then, someone can read that and feel the way I
felt about horses. That means the magic of The Scorpio Races was real.
The other way that magic should be written is, as I said, it should be simple, it's got to make sense. I like
to use the lightning strike rule. The lightning strike rule is this. When a character is struck by lightning,
you immediately gasp and you understand that's a bad idea, no one wants to be struck by lightning. You
don't have to pause and think, "Oh right, so lightning I was taught a long time ago involves electricity,
something about ions, and now they're toast. Right, okay." No.
Instead, if you are watching a movie, or reading a book, someone's struck by lighting, you can have an
immediate emotional response. That is something that you cannot take for granted with magic rules.
Magic rules have to be explained long before you need them. That's the reason why lightning strikes
work in books. Yes, you had to learn at some point that lightning strikes were dangerous, instead of
being taught in the moment what a lightning strike can do to you. So therefore, like I said, immediate
emotional response. Same thing with magic, teach them about the lightning strike of magic long before
you need to actually strike them with magical lightning later, and that way it allows your readers to have
immediate emotional response to a magical consequence.
A young adult author I know, Carrie Ryan, once told me of a fantastic concept that she used in her
writing, and I don't think she was specifically talking about it in regards to magic. But, it applies to magic.
It applies to everything. I've used this concept more times than I can possibly imagine. She called it,
"Give me points." She said basically that every writer began with a certain pile of give me points, and
you can use them however you want to. But, once you spent them, they were gone.
She said, "Here are things that you can lose your give me points on." Complicated names on the
characters part. If you look at the name and you don't know how to say it, then you've used up some
give me points. Unusual breaking of the rules of the world. If you break gravity, you've used up some
give me points. Killing a cat, use all your give me points. What she was saying was that there were
certain things that used up sympathy, and used up the readers attention, and you were allowed to do
them. But, you had to know that you were wearing on the readers nerve, that you were spending their
attention, and eventually their wallet would be empty.
I keep this in mind when I'm writing magic, and when I'm writing things that are culturally important to
me. I grew up with Celtic mythology of all kinds, and I have to keep myself in the mindset that it's all
very well and good that I know how to pronounce something that is written in complicated Gaelic, but
my readers are not going to know how to pronounce it, so I have a choice. Do I put it on page and ask
them to use the attention, the give me points to try and figure it out? Or, do I paraphrase it instead? Do I
instead make it easy on them, and use those give me points elsewhere?
When you're writing magic, when you're using your own folklore, when you're drawing from a different
cultural tradition that you don't think that your reader will come from. Remember, you can use those
give me points in any way you'd like, but once they're gone, they're gone. Ask yourself, "Is this where I
want to use it, or do I want to contextualize this better for the reader, and I will spend those somewhere
else, because I might need to kill a cat later?"
VIDEO 27:
Long, long ago in the galaxy far, far away... Actually, just long, long ago. It took place in this galaxy. It
took place in this state. It was Virginia. A different part of Virginia, but still Virginia. Long, long ago, I
wrote a novel. It was a big novel, 90,000 words, third person, dense and intractable. And I was querying
editors and agents with it. It was about a talented musical teen who had to grapple with the homicidal
fairies, which is a plot that should sound familiar to you. And I got a bite from an editor. Andrew Carr
was his name.
He read it, he replied back to me. He said, "You know what? This is pretty. This has got something here.
There is something interesting and unique here. What do you think about editing it a little bit? And then
I'll take it to acquisitions and see if they want to buy it here at the publishing house."
And I said, "Sure. Yes, lay it on me." And I dived into the manuscript and I edited it a little bit. I sent it
back, and he took it to acquisitions.
He called me back a couple of weeks later and said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't get everyone else completely
on board. But you know what? I still think you have a very interesting kind of voice. Next time you write
something, will you send it to me?"
I said, "Yes, absolutely. Of course."
I was so excited because I'd been querying for years and years, and this felt like I was getting
somewhere. I took another year, I wrote another book and I sent it to him. He wrote me back and he
said, "You have gotten better, but I can't stop thinking about your first book that you sent me. What do
you think about editing it? Only this time, do it for real, and I'll take it to acquisitions and see what they
say."
And I said, "What are you thinking?"
He's like, "Younger, hipper, tighter, more modern."
I said, "All right, I'll give it a shot."
Now, I had learned so much from writing another book in between that I knew that if I dove back into
that first manuscript and just messed around under the hood, I'd just kind of fix some of the problems
that I had there, but I wouldn't fix structurally what I had done wrong. I knew now that I had been
writing the actual bones wrong, so just moving the details wouldn't do it. I did a blind rewrite of the first
three chapters. I closed the manuscript, opened a fresh new one, and I wrote the three chapters based
upon what I remembered happening rather than just looking at my old, bad proofs.
Then I sent it to him and said, "Like this? Is it something like this? It's really different, so I don't want to
go on if you're not into this."
And he said, "No, that's amazing. Stop right there. I'm taking it to acquisitions."
And he did. And he came back and he said, "We're buying it."
Later I said, "Wait, wait, wait, Andrew, why did you buy it based upon three chapters? What if I'd gone
completely off the rails after that?"
And Andrew said, something that I've never forgotten, he told me that it wasn't about how good those
chapters were. It was about how much work I was willing to do to make those chapters good. It told
him, that no matter what I did wrong in the rest of the book, I would be willing to just do the work to
make it a good manuscript. And he said, "That's all that matters. Not buying a book, acquiring a writer
who does the work on books."
I've never forgotten that. I think it's so important to remember that books get made in editing and
revision. The rough draft is not for the reader. The rough draft is our document. When we make it for
the reader is in this part, editing, revision.
We talked for the first part of the seminar, for hours, about getting it out of our head. For the second
part, about putting it onto paper. And I feel like that's what we talk about a lot in the writing
community. We talk about Butt-in-Chair and NaNoWriMo, and just getting the words out. We talk less
about where books really get made. We talk less about the process of editing, revision, about working
again and again and again.
I don't know if it's because that's not romantic. I don't know if it's because it requires you putting aside
your ego, or I don't know if it has to do with the fact that it's really hard to be objective. But yeah,
revision and editing is what we're going to talk about now. And I honestly cannot wait. This is when the
book is going to become the thing that you hand to readers.
You need three things for a good revision. One, you need the right mindset. Two, you need objectivity.
Three, you need good priorities.
Okay, the mindset, the mindset, the mindset. Do you remember at the beginning of this seminar, many
hours ago, when we were younger, I told you that if I could give everyone watching this seminar one
thing it would be the understanding of durability? You are a writer of stories. You are a writer of ideas.
You are not this one idea. You're not this one draft. You are full of so many things. This is where your
power is. This is just a worksheet. And that is the goal.
I'm telling you this because so many people are crushed when they get feedback at this level. But this is
just people giving feedback on one manifestation of a version that you're trying to get out of your head.
It doesn't reflect on you as a person at all. You are not your ideas. You are not this draft. Even if you
pour all of yourself into this draft, if you feel like you have made it so personal, if you feel like you've
given your all, I'm glad. That's great. That's exactly what writing is.
However, the true proving ground is that you have made the reader feel the same way about it as you. If
this draft isn't working, it's not a judgment of your idea. It's a judgment of your execution of your idea,
which is an important distinction because revision is about closing the distance between this, and this.
That's all that revision is. It's about making them, see your vision, the way that you want them to see it.
They don't even have to like the book on the other side. Maybe you make a book... I mean, no book is
going to be everybody's favorite book. Instead, it's about making the book that you intend to write. And
if they don't like what you've intended, that's one thing. But, if it's because they aren't seeing your
vision, that's revision. That's revision.
You have to get into the place where you don't take it personally. You need to get to the place where
you understand this is just another step in the game. If they don't like it, great, awesome. Now you fix it.
That's the writer's job. It's very important to get ego out of the way because you're going to need all of
your instincts later in the next step of revision, the second part, which is objectivity.
It's very difficult to be objective with your own draft. You've been staring at it so close that all of the
solutions are ones that just came to you. All of the things that you've put onto the page come with so
many unspoken, unwritten things attached to them. You're attached to this character already. Did you
actually convey everything that's sympathetic about that character? You can't tell because it's existing
halfway in this world, halfway in this world. You don't know. You've read this chapter so many times that
the words have stopped having meaning. You have no objectivity.
This is where outside eyes come in, critique partners, writers groups, et cetera, et cetera. Not all critique
partners and writers groups are created equal however. I don't mean that some people are better at
editing than others, although they are. I just mean some people are better critique partners for you than
others.
In an ideal world, what you need is two, you need tiebreakers, readers who love the kinds of books that
you are trying to write. If they don't love the kinds of books that you're trying to write, they might give
you good writing advice for a different genre or for a book that they wish it would be. And then you'll
end up doing what I used to do. I would join writers groups and get feedback, and I thought I was
excited to get into it. And then I would get the advice and go, "Well, kind of, almost, I guess." And it was
because we came from different genres. A thriller reader would give thriller advice. A romance reader
would give romance advice. A literary reader, so on and so forth.
Once I discovered this, I thought, "All right, I think I can fish more widely." What I did is I started a
critique partner dating service on my blog. I said, "All right, guys, this is what the deal is. I will swap 50
pages with you and we will edit, and we will walk away, no questions asked, if we don't like it. But
before we do, tell me what the last book is that you love to read and the genre that you think that
you're writing and reading."
I went through a bunch of critique partners, and dates, and came away with two that I absolutely loved.
They were great because they read the kinds of works that I was trying to make. their advice was
tailored to that genre. Where they exactly the same? No. Did they have different strengths? Yes. Did I
have two for tiebreakers? Yes. And you know what? It made all the difference in the world.
And actually, there's going to be at the end of the seminar, you guys should be able to get a link to the
critique partner group. You guys can meet each other. You have all in common that you've read my
books, I think, so it maybe an easier pool to choose from.
Anyway, critique partners, objectivity; and the reason why it's so important for you to be able to put
away your ego and your hurt feelings is because at this stage of the game, when you get advice from
your critique partners, you're going to need your instincts. That when they give you a piece of advice, if
you feel like you want to push back against it, you have to be able to ask yourself, "Is it because I'm
hurt? Or is it because I feel like this piece of advice is pushing my book in a way that I don't really intend
and I need to talk to them about it?" The less you have of this ego going on, the more useful you'll be
able to be, because you'll be able to have interesting, nuanced conversations about, "No, that's not
what I intend. What I wanted this. Can you help me get there?" Objectivity, absolutely crucial.
All right, and the third thing you need for a good revision is priorities. Priorities are because you can't
revise your book forever. I mean, you can, but not if you're going to be a commercial writer and write
lots of books that are dedicated to me. That part's not true. You only have to dedicate the first one to
me. Right, so if you're going to write books and get them out there, they have to be done. You have to
be willing to let them go. Priorities mean that you know when you're going to stop, you know the things
that are most important for the reader to fix and you fix just those, and then you send it off.
Remember revision is for them. Revision is not for perfection. Revision is for the reader to see as best as
possible what you have going on in your head. That means don't do work just for you, do the work for
them. And also, don't do work that they won't notice. If you want to rearrange every single paragraph in
your book so that when you line it up, the first letter of every single paragraph spells out a haiku that is
to your husband or whatever, that's awesome. But that's also not revision for them. Do work for them.
That was the stupidest example that I could possibly think of. Who would do that? Now, I kind of want
to do that. Okay. Right. Let's move on.
It's important when revising to do things in the right order. It's like when you're writing, you want to
revise from the top down, big picture to small picture. You want to do book level, chapter level,
paragraph level, word level. There's no point making your words perfect if you end up having to delete
an entire chapter. When you're published, it works this way as well from book level to sentence level.
Your editor will first send you an edit letter. It can be a big, massive thing. Sometimes it's 10 pages long,
and it will cover big picture things. It's talking about the clarity of the plot arc. It's talking about the
sympathy of the characters. It's anything which requires a big move. It can be a massive move at this
point when they first sends you an edit letter.
Even if you are a published author, I'm still going to expect that when I send it in a manuscript, I'm going
to be asked to do something which results in me moving around chapters, changing around the order of
events in the second act, cleaning up the climax, deleting extra characters, big moves. If I am working on
the word level, I'm going to be pretty sorry that I've made a beautiful paragraph that no one will ever
see. No, big picture edits first.
After that comes a step called line edits. These are things that you can fix by looking at individual lines,
moving words and sentences and paragraphs around. I think that a lot of people believe that that is
what edits are. I certainly did. When I tried to fix that draft for Andrew at the beginning, lament that
massive 90,000 word draft, I'm sure that what I did was I lifted up the hood and just tinkered on lines.
Probably I changed a lot of lines, but that's not the same as looking at it structurally and saying, "Okay,
let's line this up to three act structure. Do I actually escalate like I'm supposed to do? I actually look
clear? Do I start at the beginning? Do I end at the end?"
Unless you start with a big picture edit, you can't fix those things in line. You can patch them up, but it's
like drawing crayons on your face instead of doing your makeup. It's the wrong tool, I guess. Why did I
say that? Can you draw on your face with crayons? That's a strangely, unpleasant metaphor.
Right, so big picture edits, line edits, and then after that are copy edits. Copy edits are when someone
comes through and says, "You have written three Tuesdays in a row. This person's eyes were blue, and
now they are red. You said that this person walked into the room holding a handbag, and now they left
and they're carrying a backpack. Did you mean to do that?"
Sometimes I will find that critique partners think that copy edits are edits, and that's not true either.
There's nothing more annoying than sending a draft off for a read and then someone comes back and
says, "Yeah... " Something really nitpicky about there's four Fridays in a row. That doesn't matter. That
doesn't matter because you know why I might end up deleting the entire second act, so ignore the
Fridays. Think of the big picture. Again, we're working from the top down.
Now, what am I revising for? I'm looking for clarity. I'm looking out for repetition to make sure I'm not
repeating characters, themes, not having two chapters do the exact same thing. I'm looking specificity.
I'm trying to make sure I'm telling the story that only I can tell, instead of reaching for a cliche. I'm
looking for good escalation. I want to make sure that all of my conflict is slowly getting ramped up.
A lot of times I write out of order. I don't think I'm writing out of order. I think I'm writing a second act
and everything's doing well. But then when I look back, I realize I've put a giant conflict at the beginning
and then I tapered down. Sometimes I need to tamp down this conflict and dial this one up. But
sometimes I just need to move chapters.
I'm looking for sympathy. I want to make sure that my character is interesting. That they haven't done
something that completely turns people off. And I'm also looking for intention. Am I making the book
into the book that I intended it to be? Because it's perfectly possible to write a good book, which is not
the book that you want. It's always important to check back in with that daydream. When you were
thinking of that book and the music was playing in your head and you were picturing a reader opening it,
is that the book that you have edited too? If not, try again.
VIDEO 28:
Okay. We're nearly at the end of our time together. If you're still watching, thank you for still watching. I
hope that you have gotten something out of this, even if it's just, water and caffeine and maybe some
jumping jacks. Now that we're at the end of our time together, though, I would like to revisit something I
talked about at the very beginning of this seminar. When I said that, I thought about when I was writing
this seminar, the one thing that I wished I could convey to every writer to make them really believe and
internalize when they watched this seminar. I want to talk about that again. I want to talk about
durability. Yeah. I want to talk about how I really want you guys to shut off this video and think of
yourself as not the writer of one idea, not the writer of the one book, but instead, a creator of worlds, a
creator of many ideas, someone who is made to make ideas.
The fact that you're watching this in the first place means that you're a storyteller. I mean, you're human
and you're alive so I already know that you're a storyteller, but watching this means that you have a
drive to share them with other people. Do they have to be novels? Maybe not. Maybe you'll go on to
write plays or you'll go onto write poetry or you'll go onto write short stories or whatever. But what I
want you to do is to create. I want you to be durable, I realized there are so many things in the world
that stop us from being durable as creators. There's so much that gets in the way of us feeling like we
can just play with words. I know that time gets in the way. I know that we're in school, we're at work, we
have kids, we get sick. The world gets literally set on fire.
I mean, COVID comes and sends us all wondering if we're going to be wiped out in a zombie apocalypse
with flu like symptoms. I mean, the world comes for us and says, stop playing. What are you playing for?
That's not important. I am important. So I understand that durability takes an attack that way. I know
that durability takes an attack with self doubt. I know that if you can't get the draft out, that you start
wondering if it's worth spending the time on it. I know that when you get the draft out and someone
critiques it, you ask if you actually have what it takes to be able to fix the draft in the long run. I know
that when you get writer's block, you wonder, am I ever going to get the words back again? I know that
all of these things come for us and durability.
But I want to tell you that durability is like idea making. Durability is not inherent. Durability is practiced.
Durability means being a creator, standing up, looking at a world that is flawed. It's flawed every single
day, looking at a life that's full of things that are asking for your time and saying, yes, do you know what?
This is worth it. This is something that's important to me and the words might not be coming today, but
they will come because I am a person who makes words for other people. I'm a person that is going to
be durable. It's about intention. A lot of times being a creator is about doing the exact same thing that I
asked you to do with your book.
Instead of thinking, I'm holding this book in my hand, what's it going to look like in someone else's hand,
I want you to take a moment and instead, imagine yourself. I want you to close your eyes and think of
the person that you'll be in five years or 10 years. What does that creator look like? What does your
average workday look like? What does your average creation look like? What does your creative space
look like? Imagine it as fully as you can, and then shoot yourself towards that goal. I believe in you. I
know that that sounds super corny, but you guys are here. You took the first step. You already have
intention for who you want to be and it's someone who makes stories. So get out there, make stories,
fail, make ugly stories they're for you, fail again, fix them, get better and better do it again and again and
again until you end up with something that you love.
Then dedicated to me for Maggie Stiefvater, my mentor. Okay. You don't have to do that you can put it
in the acknowledgements instead. Anyway, get out there. Start creating. I believe in you. Go.